


Wavetide

by ForASecondThereWedWon



Series: Spideychelle: The Midtown Years [38]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: (mostly), Alternate Universe - College/University, Childhood Friends, College Student Michelle Jones, College Student Peter Parker, Cunnilingus, Denial of Feelings, F/M, First Kiss, First Time, Fluff, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, Growing Up, Happy Ending, Heartache, Horny Peter Parker, Idiots in Love, Love Confessions, Michelle Jones is very observant (when she wants to be), Movie Night, Ned Leeds is a Good Bro, Pining, Practice Kissing, Pre-Spider-Man: Homecoming, Prompt Fic, Secret Crush, Sharing a Bed, Slow Dancing, Spider-Man: Far From Home (Movie), Spider-Man: Homecoming Compliant, Supportive May Parker (Spider-Man), Tumblr Prompt, semi-compliant with:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:53:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26800201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForASecondThereWedWon/pseuds/ForASecondThereWedWon
Summary: She never tells anyone. Well, she admitted it to Ned once because he caught her staring at Peter in a way that was too difficult to deny, but she’s never confessed to the fact that her love for their friend isn’t a solitary tsunami of longing; it sweeps in and out in waves.
Relationships: Michelle Jones/Peter Parker
Series: Spideychelle: The Midtown Years [38]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1808812
Comments: 277
Kudos: 223





	1. just like children sleepin'/we could dream this night away

**Author's Note:**

> This is the product of me wanting to write something inspired by Neil Young's "Harvest Moon," combined with two anonymous Tumblr prompts: 10. You confessed your feelings and we're about to kiss but we get interrupted + 36. Friends with benefits and both people catching feelings

Michelle Jones’s life is a world-record attempt at most times falling in love with the same person. She’s loved Peter Parker on-and-off dozens of times since they were 10, and they’re only 12 now, so it’s almost a weekly thing. He’ll make her laugh right when they’re coming in from recess and she’ll love him. He’ll pick her for his squad when they’re doing wind sprints in gym and he’s her thoughtless best friend again. She never tells anyone. Well, she admitted it to Ned once because he caught her staring at Peter in a way that was too difficult to deny, but she’s never confessed to the fact that her love for their friend isn’t a solitary tsunami of longing; it sweeps in and out in waves.

When they wake up, Peter will be 13. A teenager. They’re camped out in the Leedses’ living room in anticipation of the big event. His aunt and uncle are going to host the actual party at their apartment tomorrow, with cake and balloons and everything, but tonight, the three friends have Ned’s pup tent set up indoors (was supposed to be outdoors, but it’s raining). The scenario feels strangely like a farewell to their mutual childhood and Michelle’s having a hard time falling asleep.

Ned’s been asleep for half an hour, but she doesn’t realize Peter hasn’t joined him until she rolls over on the air mattress and he turns his head to look at her. Ned’s on the far end; they always banish him to the edge for snoring. Peter’s hair shushes against the cotton pillowcase as he adjusts, still watching her.

“Do you think it’s after midnight?” he whispers.

“Maybe. Happy birthday.”

“Thanks.”

He smiles at her and Michelle draws her knees up to her chest inside her sleeping bag, hugging them in place. She’s grateful that the three of them are still allowed to do this, have sleepovers in confined spaces and all sleep on the same air mattress.

Peter garbles something through a large yawn and she snickers, shuffling closer. The confusing tug of her reluctance to grow up eases when she concentrates on him.

“What?” she asks.

“I wonder if it’s still raining,” he repeats.

“We could go see?”

Ned’s house after dark is weighted by dense silence. Michelle doesn’t have to ask if Peter feels it too, because they’ve discussed it on other occasions when Ned was the first to conk out for the night. The Leedses’ home is a fascinating place for two kids who’ve grown up in apartments. The lowness of every window looking out on the ground floor, the quiet of no neighbours on the other side of the wall. It’s almost creepy.

They shift their weight carefully, wriggling off the air mattress like commandos crawling under barbed wire, trying not to jostle Ned in his slumber.

“Bouncy castle,” Peter hisses at her and pumps his arms against the mattress to make them both sway on their hands and knees.

“Stop it,” she says, giggling as her eyes flick to Ned. It’s ok, he’s still asleep.

With a rub of nylon, they slither out of the tent. Peter darts his arm back in to snatch his sleeping bag. Michelle glances sideways to see how he’s bundled about half of it into his arms as they pad across the carpet. Ned’s mom drew the blinds and Michelle shuffles over to part them, but Peter pulls her wrist and they go to the back door instead. With a flip of the lock, he slides the glass door open, letting the sound of chittering insects pour through the screen. The rain’s done. There’s a big oak in the yard and Michelle can see the bright lightbulb curve of the moon above its crown before she and Peter sit cross-legged on the floor.

“Are you cold?” he asks.

“No.”

But it’s nice when Peter unzips his sleeping bag all the way so they can pull it around their shoulders like two kings with one luxurious cape. Michelle grips the corner over her left shoulder, Peter over his right. Even a year ago, this might’ve been the moment where she confessed to how tired she was and felt him gather her close, making sure the sleeping bag tucked around to cover her knees. Tonight, she has a soft white bra under her pajama top because she’s too aware of her friends being _boys_ to take it off, even to sleep. Under that, she has a heart that gushes and swells with this feeling she gets whenever she sneaks a look at her friend’s sleepy face, the hair that tumbles onto his forehead and curls up above his ears.

“Fireflies,” Peter points out, scratching his finger against the screen when he gestures too fast and misjudges the distance. He’s right. They’re blinking yellow all over Ned’s yard.

“Yeah.”

“You think they’re lucky?”

“Not that lucky. They only live for two months. I read that,” she says. There’s a mosquito bite on the back of her arm that makes her currently unsympathetic towards bugs.

“But what if I want to make a wish on them?”

“On a firefly that’s going to die in two months? Why would you?”

“Lit birthday candles last way shorter than that,” he counters, “and we make wishes on them.”

“Well, that’s just because men are obsessed with demonstrating their dominance over fire. _Man master of fire_!” Michelle elucidates in a Neanderthal grunt.

“That’s not really why we blow out candles, is it?” Peter asks. She shrugs next to him. “It can’t be,” he says with more certainty. She doesn’t respond. “Still, they’re pretty.”

Michelle looks to see him watching the fireflies, eyes darting to each flare of light in turn. She’s on the dock of her childhood and she can spot the next wave rolling in.

“What would you wish for?” she asks.

Peter scoffs and twists a little so he can focus on her.

“I can’t _tell_ you.”

“You can as practice. The wish only doesn’t come true if you talk about it _after_ you blow out your candles. Allegedly,” Michelle adds, because they aren’t children anymore and she, for one, will not be taken in by nonsense on the arcaneness of birthday wishes.

“A real lightsaber.”

“That’s dumb.”

“It’s not _your_ wish!” he says.

“No kidding.”

He shrugs off her sarcasm.

“I don’t really want anything.”

“Don’t pout just because you can’t be a Gemini.”

“Jedi.”

Oh, she knows what they’re called. She’s employed this particular taunt many, many times.

“Pick something,” Michelle urges.

“I do, uh…”

Peter drops his gaze and plays with the string dangling from the edge of the sleeping bag. This is suspicious behaviour. She studies him, attempting to recall the information on reading body language she’s picked up from true-crime books and fake-crime TV shows. Her parents don’t like her reading or watching that stuff ‘at her age,’ but she’s a firm believer in a running start to teenage rebellion.

A warm breeze rustles the oak’s green leaves and washes over their faces.

“I do want one thing,” he mumbles. It’s _barely_ spoken―the gentle wind is making more noise.

There’s something off and it makes Michelle nervous. Everything inside her, apart from her brain, thinks it knows where this is going when Peter licks his lips and flexes his hands briefly like he does when he’s making a decision. She’s waited for this. She’s scared of this. How it’ll change them. She almost wants to go back to five minutes ago, when they were side by side in the tent with nothing to make them feel older except her feet hanging off the end of the air mattress when she scrunched down to get her head aligned with Peter’s so they could talk softly in the dark. Michelle asks her best friend what it is he wants, but only in her head.

“I want to kiss you,” he says, looking at her.

“Why?” she blurts.

“I just do.”

Her heart’s galloping. The wave’s about to crash.

“I guess it makes sense,” Michelle bluffs. Her whole body feels numb with the anticipation.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ll be starting high school in a year and people are going to start getting together so I guess I get why you don’t want to be left behind or whatever.”

Peter faces forward again and she can see him well enough to watch his throat jerk as he swallows.

“MJ, that’s not why.”

“Sure it is. You want practice.”

“It’s not like that,” he says and she’d bet he heard that somewhere, all the old movies he watches, because it sounds too grown up for her Peter.

“Do it then.”

His head snaps up and he looks at her.

“What?”

“Do it. Kiss me.”

She tries to square her shoulders and be the self he knows her to be. The Michelle who steps between bullies and her boys. The Michelle who isn’t scared to hold a bug or go to the section of the Halloween store with the really disturbing rubber masks that have, like, eyeballs dangling out of their sockets.

“You want me to?”

“Yeah, I want to see if you’re good at it,” she says toughly, chin up in a challenge.

“ _You’ll_ probably be good at it,” Peter mumbles under his breath as he scoots to face her instead of the door. Michelle mirrors him.

As he leans towards her, she can feel herself inside the wave―water all around and her twirling in a complicated pattern as it decides what to do with her. Not wanting Peter to get all the credit for going through with this, Michelle bends in his direction. Their knees make contact and she glances down at where her best friend’s shins cross. She sees fine brown leg hair, then squeezes her eyes shut as she tilts her face up, scared of however he appears in this moment. She’s surprised that she doesn’t flinch when his fingertips touch her cheek. He exhales in a soft puff, close.

“ _I really like you_ ,” he murmurs.

Michelle’s underwater and can’t speak.

And then, “COOKIE!” someone yells in the night. A dog yaps sharply in response.

Michelle and Peter spring apart at the sound of one of Ned’s neighbours. Are they going to persevere? Get back in kissing distance and find out if they have some kind of spark that’ll tell them they’re meant to be more than friends? That’s how it seems to work in the old movies _she_ watches and doesn’t tell the boys about. She’s not sure yet where rom-coms fit in the image of herself she’s only beginning to sketch, so she keeps them quiet.

Because she’d rather make a wrong action that’s all her own than react to whatever Peter decides to do, Michelle scrambles swiftly to her feet.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” she says. It seems like the least romantic thing she can say. Peter stands too, eyes searching hers uncomfortably. The shared sleeping bag is neglected at their feet.

She strides off and he doesn’t try to grab her to stop her. She’s not sure what she’d do if he did. The bathroom’s down the hall and when she looks back, she sees him in his t-shirt and pajama shorts, scooping up the sleeping bag. A distinct longing to swim out to him surges inside her, but the wave of more-than-a-friendship-kind-of-love flings her away and she faceplants on the beach of Unrequited Crushes. Maybe… soon… they can still try? Because they’re both too embarrassed tonight when she eventually returns to the tent. And she acts like nothing happened during his birthday party. When his uncle dies suddenly and terribly, she can’t put any kind of expectation on Peter for them to be anything but friends. He needs her as a _friend_. The memory of him standing at the back door with his arms full of sleeping bag lingers. In Michelle’s mind, she turns away from the ocean. If she doesn’t look, she can’t see the wave.


	2. but there’s a full moon risin’/let’s go dancin’ in the light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, so, the chapter count increased.  
> 

“Hey, you think Peter’s Spider-Man?” she questions Ned casually.

They’re sharing carrot sticks and he keeps eyeing her every time she dunks one into the little container of ranch dressing, though she would _never_ double dip. His suspicion is offensive. Which is why she’s prodding him with this question.

Ned laughs loudly.

“Peter? Of course not. One, he couldn’t keep that secret, and two―” _Crunch_. “―why wouldn’t he use that on Liz? He knows she has a crush on Spider-Man.”

Michelle frowns and considers their friend. Across the cafeteria, he’s laughing as he speaks to Liz Allan. The fact that she’s only slightly smiling convinces Michelle that Peter’s just laughing because he’s feeling awkward and lust-blinded, which means he’s trying to flirt with Liz. Again. Oh, she supports him, but she also thinks he’s every inch an idiot. Liz is a _senior_. She’s not going to go for some dorky fifteen-year-old, no matter how many right answers he gives at decathlon practice.

“Good point,” she allows.

“Why would you think he _is_ Spider-Man?”

“I don’t know.” Michelle shrugs. “He always seems like he’s in a rush, but, like, where’s he got to get to? He quit most of his clubs. And I saw him get a test back the other day and look really bummed about it, so I don’t think he’s been studying.”

“Well, I think the Stark internship takes up a lot of his time,” Ned says. “If he does well with that, it’ll be worth a couple bad grades. That stuff’s not gonna matter when he’s getting a job offer from Tony Stark himself.”

She hums and selects another carrot, looking down as she swirls it around in the dip.

Ned’s probably right. Michelle doesn’t even want her theory to be true, but she’s spending so much time watching Peter that her brain’s decided that all of her observations are pieces in a puzzle she needs to solve. She knows what the puzzle looks like. It’s not a portrait of Spider-Man but a picture of her own loneliness. Collecting clues is better than accepting that she doesn’t know Peter like she used to.

She doesn’t think it’s at the stage that they’re strangers to each other, but then, why can’t she come up with an answer as certain as Ned’s? Why doesn’t she know what’s stopping brainiac Peter from getting good grades? Why can’t she explain why Liz is smiling wider now and shyly tucking her hair behind her ear as Peter shifts into a more confident stance? Michelle didn’t think they would drift during their high school years and it feels like things are too far gone to rectify in a way that wouldn’t be messy and embarrassing and make her feel so _visible_.

“You better pack up,” Ned says abruptly.

“Why?”

“Uh, because Peter’s coming over here and you always run away from him.”

“I do not,” she retorts, and promptly runs away with the carrot stick clamped between her teeth.

They’re still _friends_. It takes a lot of drama to warrant terminating a friendship in high school and Michelle doesn’t have the time to devote to a thorough falling-out. Sometimes she wonders if it was her or him though; he was already becoming secretive while his uncle was still alive and his death only made Peter withdraw further. It seems to her that she simply respected his space when talking about things made him too antsy, that she concentrated on her own interests when she stopped being able to figure out what Peter’s were. Of course, there was that moment they had on the eve of Peter’s thirteenth birthday. Michelle chalks it up to hormones and overtiredness when she thinks of it at all.

She remains close-ish with Ned and doesn’t hunger for new people the way the boys do―Ned for Betty and Peter for Liz (and Flash for Peter, though Michelle’s the only one who seems to have perceived it). The way she misses Peter is so low-level that it feels like boredom. Her solitude is outwardly lazy and things like parties and field trips and carpool happen around her before she can get out of the way.

The look in his eyes promises an end to that boredom, a loosening of the quicksand sucking at her limbs, when Peter starts turning into her gaze in the days after she observed him with Liz in the cafeteria. It’s unnerving. Like a portrait staring back at her from the page. And it’s irritating, because Michelle’s been tracking him with her eyes since the beginning of this school year and now she can’t do that because he insists on catching her staring. Her passive hobby is over and whatever promise he’s making better be worth it. She didn’t ask to be noticed.

“Do you like Liz?” Peter asks Michelle during gym class.

She has her legs stretched into a wide V and a heavy hardcover open on the cold floor between them. Curving forward, Michelle plants her elbows just inside her thighs and keeps reading, seeing if her friend will go away. This actually makes her back feel pretty good. Maybe Coach Wilson is onto something with these warmups―though, technically, they did conclude half an hour ago. But it’s easier to read while stretching than playing ringette with the rest of the class. Coach huffs and sighs like a toddler, but doesn’t push her to join in. She’s set a precedent.

Peter’s still standing there and she glances up to see him pull his foot behind his butt, making what she can see of his thigh below his shorts go hard and tense. The muscles are something she forgot to mention when making her case to Ned about the possibility that their friend is Spider-Man.

“Everyone likes Liz,” Michelle says.

“Yeah, but… like, what’s your opinion of her? What do you think about her?”

“What is this, a fifties CIA investigation? Do you suspect her of communism?”

Peter laughs the awkward laugh that always makes him seem guilty (even when it’s impossible).

“No, I just want your opinion as a―” They lock eyes. With hers, Michelle dares him to finish that sentence. “―girl,” he croaks.

She stares at him, unimpressed.

“What do you want? I’m trying to read.”

“I said! Your opin―”

“That’s not what you really want to ask me,” Michelle deduces with a shrewd narrowing of her eyes. Peter drops his foot and his sneaker squeaks across the floor. “Talk to me when you know what you want to ask.”

And she hunches over her book once more while her friend gets called back into regular gym class activities.

After, she hopes she hasn’t permanently driven him off. She’s kind of intrigued and normally she’d just watch the mystery unfold across afternoons at Midtown like slipping into a movie theatre every day for a matinee, but this time, Michelle’s curious enough to want a role. If Peter still feels like involving her. He’s fickle and flighty and potentially superpowered, but also used to be her very best friend. His interest in Liz interests _her_.

She doesn’t buy that whatever he wants to involve her in is because she’s _a girl_ , though, as far as she knows, he hasn’t approached Ned about this. If it were girl advice, he’d go to Ned―she’s heard them admiring and analyzing everything from Liz’s opinions to her outfits. That’s what makes him coming to Michelle so compelling. She sketches on the sidelines (because Peter ruined watching him for her) and waits.

At night, he finds her. A specific night, a post-party-at-Liz’s night, with the air getting cool and the last fireflies of the season blinking a few feet off the ground in the middle of the street.

“Death wish,” Michelle mutters, because these tiny golden fools are going to spend the last of their light getting mashed against the grill of the first vehicle that passes.

She’s out front, watching them dance their final waltz, when Peter comes staggering down the sidewalk like he’s either drunk or was running much faster until a second ago and slowed in a hurry when he spotted her standing in the dark.

“Hey,” he says, approaching with a smile and a nonchalant swing of his arms.

She frowns in instant suspicion. She never saw her friend leave the party, but she noticed when he wasn’t there. And now he’s walking back to the house from somewhere up the street? They don’t know anyone else in this neighbourhood. His aunt gave him a ride here; Michelle saw.

“Where have you been?”

“What?”

“You disappeared for ages.” She takes a pensive pause to reflect. “Mainly, you missed Flash mocking you. No new nicknames, just the same old one. I wonder how long it’ll take him to realize he has a massive crush on you.”

Peter stares at her.

“I… what? Flash? I have questions.”

“Cool, I just have the same _one_ question that I already asked.” Her tone is flat, uncompromising. “Where were you?”

When he looks around, mouth hanging open as it awaits whatever underwhelming response he hasn’t yet come up with, Michelle rolls her eyes and decides she’d rather he didn’t bother with a lie. She waves dismissively.

“Never mind. The party’s over. Ned wanted to wait around for you―I guess his dad was driving you guys home?―but he didn’t seem to know when you’d be back, and his dad was idling the car, so, you know, harmful emissions. I told him to go ahead and I’d keep an eye out.”

Peter crosses his arms over his chest.

“Why are _you_ still here?” he asks. Like he can turn this around on her. Amateur.

“Because I stayed to help Liz clean. Everybody likes Liz,” she says, calling him back to their chat in the gym the other day, “but they still make a mess of her parents’ house.”

“I guess their good intentions don’t count for much when somebody else has to clean up after them, huh?”

It’s an offhand remark―one that she slips neatly into her brain’s ‘Peter’s Being Weird’ file.

“And _your_ good intentions have brought you back to do what exactly?” she quizzes. “Since you obviously didn’t mean to come assist us with peeling an entire cheese pizza off the bathroom ceiling. Don’t ask; you get the picture.”

“I just… didn’t really get to spend any time with her,” Peter mumbles.

Michelle watches the way he retracts his hands into the sleeves of his hoodie, then finds the edges with his fingers and draws them up inside, inverting the cuffs. He’s sad, worried, in a way that’s specific to his brand of heartsickness rather than school worry or May’s-stressed-about-money worry. He missed a shot with the girl he’s been pining for. Sometimes, he’s so easy to figure out.

“Maybe it wasn’t the best setting,” she offers, trying to be kind and not critical. “You know, with all those other people around.”

“Yeah, but it never seems to be the right setting. Or the right time,” Peter complains. He stares across the street with his gaze unfocused. He’s forgetting she’s here and instead of being offended, she loves this. Finally, a chance to observe him again, with the added bonus of him speaking every one of his thoughts aloud so she doesn’t need to conjecture. “At school, Liz is always busy and, and there are people _watching_. And I get caught up thinking about how _they’re_ probably thinking, ‘Who’s this guy? What’s he think he’s doing, talking to Liz Allan?’”

“You need to feel worthy,” she blurts. It’s analysis on the fly and she doesn’t give a fuck if it’s the way Freud did things because Michelle knows she’s right, goddammit. “You want to talk to Liz and, you’re assuming, given the correct circumstances, you’d be able to talk to Liz, but those circumstances refuse to manifest. Yes?”

“Yes,” he agrees, nodding fast because it appears that what both of them are hearing is that Michelle sounds like she knows what she’s talking about. She used to know Peter.

“So, you’re not getting the circumstances, which means…”

He looks at her, eyes hopeful and round.

“It means…?”

“That you have to change something with yourself instead.”

Peter frowns.

“May would say―”

“I don’t mean like trade your fins for legs, Ariel,” Michelle interrupts. “You just have to convince yourself that you’re good enough to talk to her. Which you obviously are.” (She would feel like she was letting May down if she didn’t toss in a little ego boost.) “Then you won’t notice that anyone’s watching.”

“How do I… do any of that?”

“Are you asking me how to give yourself a pep talk? ’Cause, pep? Not really my area of expertise.”

“I don’t know if a pep talk is exactly the right thing,” he challenges, expression dubious. “Like, I’ve _been_ psyching myself up to talk to Liz. Ned’s been encouraging me and May… well, you know May.”

“May thinks you can do anything.”

“Exactly,” Peter acknowledges with a sigh. “So, I think I probably need… help.”

She studies him critically.

“You never ask for help.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Not recently. You’re too cagey, you don’t let people in. Before you bother arguing, let me point out that it takes one to know one,” Michelle admits.

He frowns out at the street again for a minute, then his face brightens. Snapping his fingers, he swivels gracefully to face her.

“You get it!” Peter says.

“…Yep.”

“ _You_ can help me!”

“Uh, no. Like I just said, I’m pretty pep-less.”

“No, it’ll be something else, not pep.” The space between his eyebrows furrows.

“Wow,” Michelle comments wryly, “you almost look thoughtful. Have you been practicing?”

“ _Practicing_ …”

His voice comes out with unnerving dreaminess and his gaze floats down to somewhere around her mouth. It’s freaky, like this is a zombie movie and he’s two seconds away from lurching forward and biting her face off. Fucking weirdo.

“Right,” she says slowly, “well, my mom’s picking me up any minute. Can we give you a ride?”

“What?” Peter’s eyes snap back up to hers and the light streaming from the house doesn’t give great coverage out here on the sidewalk, but he almost looks flushed. Ok, maybe a disaster movie of the pandemic variety instead and this red-faced idiot is Patient Zero, body hosting a spiking fever.

“What is up with you? What the hell are you thinking about?”

“Thinking about? Me? Nothing.”

While that’s probably true, it’s not like her friend to come right out and say it. She monitors him in the corner of her eye while they wait, then on the drive to drop him at his building. Occasionally, Michelle goes to ask him a direct question, but Peter laughs awkwardly (guiltily) and evades prolonged eye contact. She doesn’t get it. One minute, it sounds like he might want a favour. The next, he panics over meeting her gaze.

Once they’ve let him out and waited until he makes it inside, she moves from the back to the front seat. She presses her forehead to the window as she tracks the full moon up above with her eyes. Her mom has the radio on an oldies station, but the volume’s so low that Michelle can just catch the bounce of the chorus over the noise of their car in motion (there’s a rattle that her mom’s muttering about investigating this weekend―she’s pretty handy and unafraid to wriggle under the car and poke around, says it’s the best way to learn). Michelle’s not tired until she yawns, then it all hits her at once and her mom has to shake her shoulder gently to rouse her when they get home.


	3. we know where the music’s playin’/let’s go out and feel the night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand the chapter count increased again...  
> 

She acts unaffected, but she’s pretty sure what happened in Washington shaved a couple weeks off her life. Not as bad as Mr. Harrington, who spooks so easily these days that the surprise takeoff of a single pigeon might be enough to send him into cardiac arrest. Maybe it seems too pushy to intercede on her teacher’s behalf and demand he get some paid leave until his blood pressure falls, but someone should. Unfortunately, the entire decathlon team returns to New York shaken.

The trip leaves Michelle with a feeling of something on the horizon. Could be another close encounter of the Spider-Man kind, or some other interpersonal development between her classmates. Disaster is supposed to bring people together, which she thinks is a bullshit assumption (if these idiots are attracting danger, it’s more rational to maintain a careful distance), but the team does seem more bonded than before they left for the tournament. It’s… nice to feel closer to them.

Even Peter. Michelle doesn’t necessarily feel closer to him than to Betty or Cindy or Abe, but the nostalgia that hits her when he’s suddenly around more, not skipping practice, not late to class, stops being nostalgia and solidifies in the present; it’s like they’re getting their old friendship back. Ned notices too. Soon, they’re talking in the halls and at their lockers. They even have a sci-fi movie night at Ned’s that feels so much like it used to that Michelle concentrates very hard on every second of it. _Be present_ , she tells herself. _You never thought you’d get this again_.

While they watch, the boys still speak their favourite lines along with the movie and she still talks over them, nitpicking inaccuracies in the science. Ned still digs his feet into Michelle’s leg when he starts to get cold (she wallops him in the arm with the blanket he could be using instead) and she still shares her packet of licorice with Peter, even though, as always, she told him at the start of the night that he only has himself to blame for not remembering to bring his own snacks.

When Ned goes to the bathroom, Michelle and Peter sit with the screen paused, feeling a little awkward together in the dark. The old friendship functions most smoothly with the three of them, or at least some background noise. Things aren’t totally easy yet. For example, she doesn’t feel comfortable enough to ask him straight out if he’s Spider-Man, though she’s been thinking about her theory again since Spider-Man turned up in Washington, right when Peter was nowhere to be found. What would someone who wasn’t stewing over a superhero conspiracy ask their friend?

“So, homecoming,” Michelle decides on.

“Yeah,” Peter says with a nod.

“Soon.”

“Yeah.”

“You going?”

“Yeah.”

Her friend’s tone is slightly different with each ‘yeah,’ but she still shoots him a gently mocking smile and he laughs at himself.

“You’re going too, right? I mean, probably?”

It’s a weird way to ask and she squints at him to emphasize this, even as she continues to smile.

“Probably,” Michelle agrees.

“Are you going, uh, _with_ anyone? Hey, man,” he says quickly, his chin doing a little uptick to acknowledge Ned’s re-entrance.

She leans back, settling into the corner of the couch she staked out upon arrival. She didn’t notice herself tilting towards Peter as they spoke. It’s not like what they were discussing was a secret, just that the house is quiet, always this soft quiet. Her gaze flicks to Peter right before Ned sits between them again and he’s looking at her. Eyes widening like she was caught, Michelle glances swiftly away.

 _Why would he ask that?_ she wonders through the rest of _TRON_. She introduced the subject, but just to make conversation. Is that all he was doing too? It’s better than some of the homecoming-related questions he could’ve asked, like what time she’ll be getting to the dance (boring), if she’s going out for dinner beforehand (redundant, since if she does, it’ll be with him and Ned), or what she’ll be wearing (wrong for their dynamic). Basically, Michelle just has to sit here and try not to overthink a question that Peter probably didn’t think about at all before asking, as usual. Just like she overthinks Washington and all the flimsy excuses he gave before the trip. Ugh, she’s thinking about him _too much_. All this is is a bad habit. She left her internal waves behind in childhood.

Only very briefly does it cross her mind that he could be asking because he’d like to go with her. The possibility flares and vanishes like the light of a firefly and, on Monday, Michelle hears he asked Liz.

So the three of them don’t really talk about the dance. Michelle sits with Peter and Ned regularly in the cafeteria now and a bunch of times she gets the feeling they’ve stopped discussing homecoming right before she walked in. It’s so stupid; she doesn’t _care_. She’s glad her friend got his shit together, overcame his insecurities, and approached Liz with some actual romantic intent. But it does mean dinner’s off―no chance of the three of them getting ready together and hanging out. Peter’s going to be busy freaking out as the realization that he’s going to the dance with the beautiful senior who’s also their decathlon captain hits him over and over.

Michelle’s surprised to hear from him when he calls.

“I need your help!” Peter hisses over the phone.

It’s two hours until the dance, which, for him, isn’t cutting things overly close. Looks like he’s putting in an effort to not screw this up for Liz.

“With what?” she asks.

“May’s been helping me get ready and I’m dressed up and, and she taught me how to dance, but…”

“But?”

His voice is even quieter when he responds.

“I don’t know the last time May was out dancing in public, but I really don’t want to embarrass myself tonight.”

“I think that could be pretty entertaining,” is Michelle’s dry input.

“MJ, could you just… could you come over and tell me if I look like an idiot?”

It’s the nickname, revived from when they were kids, that gets her. It seems to find the gap between her ribs and poke into the gooiest part of her. Organs or something.

“Be honest, Peter. Don’t we already know the answer to that?”

“ _Please_?”

And his tone is so desperate that she agrees, packing her dress into a garment bag and slinging it over her shoulder as she walks to his building. She’s not sure she’ll have time left over to come home before the dance. Hopefully, May will offer to drive her to Midtown because Michelle knows that Peter’s planning to meet Liz at her house. This is a lark, she tells herself. A little mini-adventure to make her evening more interesting. She wasn’t going to spend hours and hours getting ready, so mocking her friend’s dance moves won’t mangle her schedule. It’s all very easy and humorous…

…Until she’s standing in Peter’s bedroom hearing herself coach him into holding her against his chest as they sway to whatever’s playing on his alarm clock radio. Apparently, May didn’t cover slow dancing.

“Is this better?” he asks, one hand against the middle of her back, the other slightly lower. Her heart thuds, just because he’s so close. She’s not sure of the last time they hugged.

“Yeah,” Michelle says. She clears her throat a little. “And I guess it’s good that Liz and I are both taller than you. You can, um, get a sense of what it’ll feel like.”

“Like practice.”

She thinks there’s a smile in his voice, but she can’t look. With a hand placed on his shoulder and her chin resting on top of that, she’s trying to be super casual about this. _Unusual_ is what this is. An unusual scenario―them rotating slowly in his room with the door shut. She sees action figures and thick volumes on advanced chemistry and strewn clean and dirty laundry as he steers her in a gentle circle. Michelle hasn’t changed yet and Peter’s hands are warm through her sweatshirt, his body unignorably solid where she grips his shoulder and has her other arm slung around his neck.

The song changes and she feels awkward, strange with him, though they used to share an air mattress, drape themselves in one sleeping bag, lay their heads on the same pillow. She backs off.

“You know,” she says, patting his shoulder fraternally and refusing to make eye contact, “I think you’ve got the hang of it. Or as well as we can hope.”

Peter twists and checks the clock without dropping his hands from her.

“Oh shit, yeah, I gotta get going!” He turns back to her and lets her go all at once, like he’s startled. “Uh, May’ll come back and get you after she drops me off at Liz’s.”

“Yeah.” Michelle gives him a tight-lipped smile because she suddenly can’t stand being in this room with him.

“Ok, well, I’ll see you there!”

He darts past her, grabbing his phone and his shoes, then hangs back, staring at her. She gives him an encouraging nod that finally sends him careening out his bedroom door.

When his aunt returns, Michelle’s dressed and ready. May makes this small, admiring sound as she looks at her in her homecoming dress and her eyes appear to be in danger of welling up. Michelle acts like nothing’s different to avoid the comments about time passing and how beautiful she is (women validating each other’s physical appearance is a whole different thing from male praise and Michelle accepts the former, just not when it might make her emotional). She allows May to snap half a dozen pictures on her phone, then they go down to the car together.

“He’ll figure it out,” May says at a red light, not glancing over to Michelle in the passenger seat.

“What do you mean?”

But Peter’s aunt just waves a hand―smiling like, _oh, don’t pay any attention to me_ ―and drives when the light turns green.

At school, Michelle finds Ned and learns that Peter isn’t here yet. Her friend makes a joke about Liz’s dad taking a long route on purpose to interrogate him about his intentions towards Liz; they get into a brief confrontation over the fact that a man attempting to control his daughter’s dating life is not a laughing matter. Really, Michelle knows Ned wasn’t supporting the idea, but she’s edgy, darting her gaze around the room, surprised to have beaten Peter here by so long.

Her eyes narrow when Liz walks in first, unaccompanied. When Peter comes through the doors a minute later, he looks… bereft. Something’s seriously wrong and Michelle stiffens. She wants Ned’s opinion, but they aren’t standing next to each other anymore and he’s already turning his back to her to wave at Peter. How can he not see? Peter’s gone cadaver-pale with wide eyes that express hopelessness, then regret as she watches him stride over to Liz. And then straight through the room. At her side, Cindy offers to grab them both a glass of punch and Michelle nods without looking at her, tracking Peter. She bolts after him the second Cindy steps away.

He’s gone by the time she reaches the hallway, and for the next couple of hours. Michelle’s mad at herself for being so absorbed in Peter’s disappearance that she misses Ned’s. Great, now where’d _he_ go? He returns mumbling about porn; it’s unconvincing _and_ unprompted, which makes it even less convincing.

Ned’s reappearance makes her roll her eyes. _Peter’s_ makes her step forward with a jerk, like a reanimated mummy. Something (or someone?) has run him ragged, and not in a maybe-he-and-Liz-are-having-a- _really_ -good-time-tonight way. Michelle swivels her head, trying to absorb other details of their surroundings—momentarily believing something inside this gym made her friend look like that—but it only makes her dizzy. Her vision doesn’t snag on the brightness of Liz’s dress though. That’s right, Liz left with Betty earlier, while Michelle was in the middle of stewing over the possible whereabouts of her two closest friends. Peter’s dateless and dishevelled and she finds she’s walking fast in his direction and barely feeling her feet hit the ground.

“What happened?” she demands, voice not loud but certainly urgent.

“I… I…”

“Fine,” Michelle sighs, “but don’t lie.”

They’ve somehow agreed that he’ll say nothing, not at the moment. He’s sweating, she observes, face shining in the lowish light that the teacher chaperones determined set the right tone between Enjoy Yourselves and Don’t Feel Each Other Up in the Shadows. Peter’s neck looks clammy in the loose collar of the dress shirt he hasn’t rebuttoned properly. His tie’s missing too. Actually, though it’s rumpled, his button-down seems to only now be absorbing the dampness of his skin, like he… changed? Why would he have brought two outfits to the dance? Even Liz didn’t do that, and she’s the most put-together, neatly packaged person Michelle knows. But Peter hasn’t been at the dance, not for more than five minutes altogether.

“She’s gone, isn’t she?” he asks, clenching his hand into a disappointed fist and letting it fall at his side like a cast stone. “I came back because… because I thought… But she isn’t here.”

“She looked sad,” Michelle offers.

She doesn’t know whether that’ll make her friend feel better or worse, but she always prioritizes honesty. It’s something she feels Peter could learn from, though she won’t push him right now.

“I just wanted to have… a normal night.”

He exhales in exhaustion as a song whips around them, classmates dancing all over the place.

“Ned got busted for watching porn,” Michelle informs him, hoping to cheer him up.

Maybe it’s just the surprise, but Peter laughs.

“He did?”

“Yeah, I think he snuck off to the computer lab. I didn’t see him…”

He looks worried again. A specific worry. Like he’s responsible, meaning he already _knew_ Ned was in the computer lab. How could he? He wasn’t here. It’s not like creeping away from a dance is something Ned would do independently though, Michelle considers. He’s a social guy, loves a party, not like her, who’s only here because… Well. Because she’s finally making friends this year and she wanted to spend time with them. Peter wanted a normal night? So did she. Normal for him might’ve been grinding up against Liz Allan to a top-40 playlist; for her, it would’ve been loosening up more around Cindy, not hesitating before laughing at Abe’s jokes. Peter blew his chance doing who knows what and, while Michelle was physically present all night, she blew hers wondering where he was. Too much thinking.

Only once she’s turned her head away from him does Michelle grab Peter’s wrist.

“We can go,” she suggests. “If you want.”

“You don’t wanna dance?” he asks in a light, laughing tone, and she can tell that’s the last thing he wants to do. He’s worn out.

“I doubt you’re up for it.”

“Harsh.”

“True.”

They go, after Peter gives Ned a fleeting flick of his hand that Michelle guesses is supposed to be a wave. She’s just going to assume they’ll debrief later, or whatever it is they call putting their heads together and whispering. Outside, on Midtown’s front steps, they’re alone. Very few people have departed the dance, which runs for another two hours yet.

She really is feeling sympathetic towards her friend, even if she’s sure he’s not going to fill her in on what he got up to tonight, until Peter notices her rubbing her hands over her upper arms and tries to wrap her in his suit jacket.

“Don’t,” she says, striving to shrug him off. “Stop it.”

His hands fall and the jacket is on her shoulders. It’s irritating, how he only halfway listens to her. She can feel her nostrils flare. She _is_ a little cold, but slipping her arms into the sleeves would ravage her corsage and make her feel like she’s let Peter get his way and she won’t. She can’t… she can’t give him that, unbalance them like that. The scent of his sweat mingled with a trace of cologne is coming off the jacket.

“It should’ve been Liz,” Peter says bitterly. It’s the explanation for his insistence. He shakes his head in apology, but doesn’t take the jacket back. “I should’ve been doing all this with Liz and I keep messing it up. I can’t—”

Michelle grips her friend’s jaw and kisses him. Only once, only quick.

“There,” she says, breathless with surprise at herself and the chill of the evening and the swell of the wave trying to rise within her. “You should’ve done that with Liz too.”


	4. but now it's gettin' late/and the moon is climbin' high

If you spend long enough on a boat, do you no longer notice it rocking? Or is the rocking always there, just more a part of you with every day that goes by? Can you exist perched atop the wave and ignore it at the same time? Michelle wonders this, chin cupped in her hand as she glances from the Saturday mid-morning sky outside the window back to Peter. His mouth’s red with how long they’ve been making out and he’s about to spot it in the mirror hanging on her wall.

“Aw man,” he groans.

“I don’t think we can train you out of that.”

“None of this is _training_ , it’s practice.” His preferred word.

She watches him rub at his lips, only intensifying the colour, and rolls her eyes.

“You do this every time,” Michelle points out.

“Do not.”

But Peter drops his hand at being caught. She doesn’t look as it falls, not wanting her gaze anywhere near the level of his hips. They’ve met up like this a couple of times now, not as many as she implied to him a minute ago, but enough that he’s awkwardly requested that she ignore it when all their sucking face gives him a boner. He might still be hard right now. During their… practice sessions, they’ve learned to maintain distance between every part of themselves besides their mouths. It definitely helps keep things professional, or whatever. Though, yeah, they’ll be weird with each other for a while after the kissing stops, they’re still _friends_. Still _just_ friends.

“Go hold an ice cube against your mouth or something,” she mumbles, eyes no longer on him at all as she digs around in her backpack. “I’m starting on the homework for Bio.”

“Ugh, already? It’s Saturday morning.”

“Excuse me for wanting to get through my work at the beginning of the weekend instead of leaving it to the last minute like you do.”

“We could wait a little while? Ned’s supposed to be here within the hour.”

“Wait if you want,” Michelle says. She shrugs and flips to the right page of her textbook. “I’m getting started.”

She hears Peter’s heavy sigh before he complains; he’s worse at resisting his academic responsibilities when she refuses to ignore them alongside him, but the guilt he feels means his short period of resistance doesn’t pass _quietly_.

“Isn’t there anything you’d rather be doing?”

On instinct, her head jerks up and their eyes meet. They glance so swiftly away from each other that Michelle feels a twinge in her neck.

“Like going for a walk or something,” Peter mutters.

She can’t respond. He’s made it weird. She _told_ him, she told him when they agreed to do this that he wasn’t allowed to make it weird! No blatant fake flirting, no suggestively trailing sentences, no communicating about their sessions by phone or text past 7pm. Nothing that mimes what a true relationship might be. They aren’t in a relationship, just an understanding, and it might be her mouth they’re landing on, but his kisses aren’t for her. They’re for Liz. Michelle’s simply a willing proxy, helping her dork friend figure out how to do this shit without too much biting or sucking or slobbering. He’s doing it so that when one of his sad attempts to spend time with Liz actually pans out, he’s ready to plant one on her in a way she won’t be able to forget. Michelle’s doing this for Liz’s benefit, obviously. Just one girl having another’s back. The conviction that an accomplished, intelligent, beautiful, worthy person like Liz deserves better than Peter’s first-ever horrifically-wet attempt to shove his tongue into her mouth is what drives Michelle.

Also, she’s mildly curious to see if he might drop any hints about possibly being Spider-Man. During, like, the throes of passion. Though this’ll go much smoother if throes of any kind are avoided.

Eventually, Ned shows up. It’s later than he was supposed to be, but Michelle knows that Saturday brunch at the Leeds house is a horrifically joyful occasion, bordering on bacchanalian. How people get that excited about breakfast food is outside her comprehension—she’s always been more of a midnight snack girl. Every extra minute of just the two of them, Peter and Michelle, means less work done (as hard as she stares at her open textbook) and more of his not-so-subtle glances. She can _feel_ them.

The tension is so bad that she thinks about suggesting they make out again, just to cut it, right as they hear Ned’s knock on the door. Well, _Peter_ seems to hear it a second before Michelle does. This is one of the moments where it’s cleaner to believe that he really is Spider-Man, with super-hearing and shit, rather than that her ears fuzzed out the knock to prioritize the imaginary sound of a turbulent ocean. Ned settles across their friend’s bed on his stomach, Peter paces with his notebook in one hand as he clicks irritatingly at the pen in his other, and Michelle keeps her spot at his desk.

When Ned turns the conversation from the review questions at the end of the Bio chapter to Peter’s crush on Liz, Michelle’s shoulders relax at last. Yes, Liz. There’s Liz. The girl he’d rather be kissing, which is fine by Michelle. The reminder uncomplicates things as neatly as a windshield wiper smearing raindrops aside. Liz is crucial to this whole thing. She’s the _point_ of this whole thing. As long as Peter has this crush on Liz, they can keep… preparing him. Liz is such a safe crush. Not an easily-transitioned-from-crush-to-girlfriend crush, but a crush Peter definitely won’t get over. Liz is too pretty, too thoughtful, too much a constant in their lives as the captain of the decathlon team for Peter to just move on.

Unless something major happens to _remove_ her.

A father rumoured to have been taken down by Spider-Man. An arrest. A mother who’d rather lick the family’s wounds of deception and disappointment from across the country. A goodbye, between Peter and Liz, that Michelle tells herself she isn’t _spying_ on, just happening upon. It’s not like they try to hide it.

He mopes for a couple weeks. That might be distracting to her, as an occasional observer of the many moods of Peter Parker, except that she has her own stuff to focus on; she’s just inherited captainship of the decathlon team. She didn’t see it coming and has no idea whether or not she’s ready for it, but Mr. Harrington must think she is because he appointed her and he’s generally terrified of things going wrong. Though a vote of confidence from Mr. Harrington shouldn’t count for much, it’s strangely reassuring. Doesn’t mean it isn’t still a lot to get used to.

Betty steps up to help Michelle (now ‘MJ’ to the team—it feels like the right time to make herself slightly more accessible) go over Liz’s meticulous notes on scheduling, weekly and monthly practice goals, and each member’s strongest subject areas. Liz didn’t track weaknesses, MJ notes with a smile as she and Betty pour through the documents their former captain left behind. She likes that. It might not paint the truest, most clinical picture of the team’s abilities, but it’s kind of a hopeful perspective. That they’ll focus on adding to what they’re good at instead of correcting gaps that probably won’t even matter, not with the way their sufficiently varied interests overlap.

MJ recognizes that she’ll likely want to make the position her own as her term continues, but until she’s ready, she’s grateful for Liz’s methods. They give her order and something to fall back on when she walks into practice and feels overwhelmed by every person in the room watching her. Even if they _are_ smiling encouragingly (minus Flash). The scariest thing is that she thinks they’re starting to see her as their captain, which kindles an uncomplicated warmth in her as her gaze darts between their faces with more confidence every week—until it lands on Peter.

Does MJ want him to listen to her, respect her, be open to learning from her? Yes. That part of seeing her as the team captain is good and necessary. Her worry is that he’s not just seeing her as captain but as the _last_ captain. She only ever witnessed the pining looks he used to shoot Liz’s way on an angle, but now they’re being beamed straight from Peter’s eyes to MJ’s. It makes her trail off mid-explanation during practice, sounding stupid and unprepared, when her gaze crosses his to find him leaning eagerly towards her, like the desk is barely keeping his body back, his dumb t-shirt barely restraining his yearning heart. Of course, once she’s broken the stare and ignored him for a while, things seem normal again. But she’s stuck at ‘ _seem_ normal’ because she’s trained herself into a certain level of suspicion with her crime thrillers and murder docs. Like how Peter’s comings and goings _seem_ normal when the bizarre demands of his internship are taken into account, yet also don’t rule out the possibility that he’s sneaking off to slip into a red bodysuit so tight and vibrant that he could be in the Cirque du Soleil troupe.

“Are you going to ask me if I think Peter’s Spider-Man?” Ned asks over the holidays. They’re in a store that’s packed floor-to-ceiling with cooking supplies, shopping for a gift for his dad. MJ’s never been anywhere so… shiny.

Her friend looks nervous, so there’s the answer to the question she wasn’t even planning to ask. She shrugs to set him at ease and lifts a finger, tracing a tree-shaped cookie cutter on a table cluttered by a prominent festive display. It’s unclear how reliable her casual façade is though, if she was already wearing an expression that apprised Ned of the fact that a question was coming.

“No,” MJ says, “just wondering if he, uh…” She means to ask her friend flat-out whether he thinks Peter has some kind of crush on her because his brain has conflated her captaincy with Liz’s, but she wimps out. “…stays in touch with Liz.”

“I don’t think he’s, like, unfollowed her on social media or anything,” Ned offers, appearing thoughtful and relieved. She exhales, also relieved. “But he doesn’t talk about her anymore.”

MJ tenses.

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, you know.” Ned gestures expressively as they walk down an aisle of baking tools; the sleeve of her coat skims whisks of all sizes and they briefly thrum and ring. “He used to never shut up about her.”

“As I recall, you were keeping track of Liz’s wardrobe just as diligently as Peter was,” she reminds him.

“Yeah, well, it’s _Liz_. It’s hard not to pay attention to _Liz_.”

“So, is he?”

“Is he what?”

Ned flicks a nail across a heavy wire cooling rack and the build and frequency of the resulting noise sound, goosebump-inducingly, like rushing water.

“Is he still paying attention to Liz?” MJ pushes. “And just not discussing it with you?”

Ned scoffs.

“Yeah right. If our tender Peter were still nursing that crush, I’d be hearing about it.”

“Has he…” Her throat dries up and she swallows a couple of times, but Ned doesn’t notice, caught up in experimentally striking his knuckles against the bottom of several large pots and listening like he’s absorbing some kind of meaning from this ridiculous exercise. “…talked to you about anybody else?”

“No, why?”

MJ changes the subject before he can glance from the pots to her face.

This is good news. Her friend’s faith in his closeness with Peter is not misplaced, she knows. If Peter hasn’t mentioned her name to Ned in any context outside the ordinary, then she’s wrong about what she thinks she’s seen. Maybe the look he gets at decathlon practice is just how he appears when he’s concentrating. Ok, it’s not exactly the same as the expression she’s observed on his face while they’re doing homework, but that’s a different type of concentration—he doesn’t need to brace himself for the textbook to start asking him questions aloud to test his knowledge.

She gives it a month, after they come back from winter break, then another two weeks, just so they can get past Valentine’s Day. And they do, without a single uncomfortable profession of feelings or a locker full of rose petals. Besides the look of… _concentration_ that he persistently beams her way during practice, Peter doesn’t exhibit any intention of coming onto her. They’re friends. There’s no reason for MJ to tiptoe around him. If anything, she’s now the one making things weird, like she used to warn him about.

Full of fresh determination, she comes up to Peter after practice one day and asks if he’d be interested in resuming their previous arrangement. The dork almost makes her crack a grin at school by looking completely confused.

“ _You know_ ,” MJ says quietly, leaning her head towards his where they stand together in the empty classroom.

“Oh, um, yes, yeah, _yes_ ,” he replies.

The eager stammer is pretty much sufficient to convince her that this is not a good idea after all, but then she sees the flash of his tongue as he wets his lips, like they’re going to recommence right here, right now. She swallows. Then realizes she’s still looking at his mouth and that finding his unconscious action thoroughly blindsiding should not be causing her to nod. But she’s nodding. This idiot licks his entirely unnoteworthy lips, her knees feel like they’re made of something as slushy as wet cement, and MJ’s gonna take it as her go-ahead? Evidently.

“So, just, the next time we study together,” she babbles. “The three of us. But before Ned gets there. Obviously.”

“Right. Yeah.”

She sees him take a steadying breath and will never admit to being thankful for being given a lead to follow in this moment; MJ inhales and her rationality returns.

“We might have waited too long to start again. We could be back at square one, when you were terrible.”

Peter snorts a laugh, always rolling with her play-punches.

“I don’t think I was ever _terrible_.”

“Please. Girls want a guy with big brown eyes like a puppy-dog, not a guy who drools like one.”

“I never drooled! Are you claiming I drooled on you?!”

“It certainly wasn’t dry,” MJ argues, preceding him out of the decathlon room, enjoying the familiar rhythm of her insulting him, him growing wildly offended. Nature is healing.

“Well, neither of us wanted it dry either,” Peter says defensively.

It’s like their gazes tug together magnetically, stuck for a moment too long. Her slight smirk slides off; his high, insulted eyebrows lower as his expression becomes abruptly intense.

“I… the library…” she begins.

“I gotta catch my bus,” he says at the same time.

With a nod and an exchange of closed-lipped smiles, they head in two separate directions.

 _It’s fine_ , MJ tells herself. _You can handle this. It was awkward the first time too_. And this is going to be exactly the same as the first time they arranged a session. Nothing’s changed. Except, when they’re sitting across from each other at her kitchen table, it occurs to her that they don’t know who they’re doing this for. She’s horrified that neither of them have raised this point and it’s ready in her mouth, a reasonable argument for delaying today’s practice until at least one of them has a person in mind for the eventual recipient of the skills they’re trying to develop here. Peter is Liz-less and MJ… she’s found a few of their classmates passingly attractive, but there isn’t anybody she’s in a rush to kiss.

“We should get started,” she says, pushing back from the table in a quick scrape and coming around to sit next to her friend.

“Here?” he asks.

She’s already angled towards him, pressing her lips to his. They’ve been drinking fruit punch and Peter’s mouth tastes magenta. When her hand trembles—from standing up and sitting down again too quickly, MJ tells herself—she grips the edge of the table, prepared to persevere. She feels him twist in his seat as they stumble through a dissonant beginning to land on the same rhythm, the same easy nudge and pull of their lips. Sideways on their chairs, MJ parts her thighs so they can sit closer, one of Peter’s thighs between hers, their legs loose. She clamps her legs together instinctually when his tongue traces just inside her lip and the motion traps his thigh. He’s warm, through the denim, and his palm is even warmer as he cups her face with purpose, apparently spurred on by her reaction. This is… this is ok… They’re still sitting down, she’s grounded by the hard chair beneath her, her grasp on the table, Peter’s hand holding her cheek. The situation is still under control.

He rises and she surges up with him.

Without breaking the kiss, they stagger free of the chairs, letting them clatter against the table, and MJ’s unmoored hand finds a new berth, grabbing her friend’s waist, scrunching his t-shirt. The other makes gentle contact with his shoulder as Peter’s free hand seizes her hip. Uh oh—there’s a swirl of phantom shallows around her ankles. She has to walk backward swiftly because he’s guiding her with serious resolve and she can almost hear the splash of her feet through water.

The back of her calves hit the couch and Peter probably doesn’t mean for it to go like this, can’t possibly intend it, but she sways and he leans and they tumble onto the cushions. For a few seconds, they continue to kiss lightly. Then, he shifts on top of her and she feels the solid bulge in the front of his jeans. MJ takes her hands off her friend _fast_ and scurries out from under him. It’s not just the erection (she didn’t _forget_ that his body responds that way to them practicing, but it’s been far out of her mind), it’s the look on his face before he tucks away some of the emotion that’s so unsettlingly out in the open.

She recognizes the way he flexes his hands as he sits up, knows he’s deciding on something. MJ shifts even farther down the couch. Away from him.

“It’s not like that,” she blurts. “With us.”

“What?”

He looks surprised that she’s spoken. Probably too absorbed in attempting to arrange his thoughts into words of his own. She doesn’t want to know them. Doesn’t want to find out how hard it might be to hear them over the pounding surf of her mind. Although she can feel him trying, MJ won’t allow him to hold her gaze.

“I can… go,” he finally suggests, voice low and soft and yet clawing at her.

“Ned,” she remembers. He’s supposed to come over in a little while, at which point she and Peter would quit practicing and get their books out, pretending that Peter arrived just before Ned.

“Right. I can text him and say you’re sick?”

MJ frowns. She doesn’t want that, for them to lie to their friend. (Though they’ve _been_ lying, keeping Ned out of the loop on this thing they do. And why? It’s unlikely that he’d judge them for perfecting their kissing technique in a safe environment. With a friend.)

“Why don’t we just… get some air?” she replies.

When he agrees, she rises from the couch first, hurriedly, and brushes past his legs. She can’t stand to catch sight of him doing whatever he needs to do to adjust himself in his jeans. Until he’s next to her by the apartment door, MJ positions herself with her back to him, fiddling her fingers through the keys in her hand. She remembers she’ll need a coat and nearly snatches it from Peter’s hand when she turns to find him holding it out to her. _Calm down_ , she thinks, and does her best to breathe.

They loiter in silence on the sidewalk in front of her building, losing their heat to puffs of steam in the February air. MJ looks at her shoes and listens to Peter shuffle in place. For warmth? For the restlessness provoked by the thoughts she refuses to give him sanction to vent?

Eventually, he says, “Look! Snow!”

She tips her head back and the snow falls gently on her face. It reminds her of something, the cascade of flakes. Streetlights and headlights hit them and they sparkle like glitter tapped from a container somewhere up in the clouds. But MJ looks higher, into the dark. All the way to the points of the crescent moon. They appear sharp enough to prick a finger, even slice open a hand in a nasty cut. Something ragged, like the feeling of choking up water, swallowed because you’ve been under too long.

MJ’s eyes move from the moon to Peter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, there is plenty of pining yet to come, friends.  
> 


	5. when we were strangers/I watched you from afar

Following a winter of Peter’s long looks and a spring of wrapping up sophomore year the same way she began it (bolting the second she saw Peter in the vicinity), MJ spends the summer as a lifeguard at a community pool. Her very reluctance to confront water when the image of the wave has been with her since childhood is what pushes her to get certified, take a refresher CPR course, and sit on a hot metal chair near the deep end four mornings out of seven. She can’t hear anything inside her own head when kids are cannonballing and splash-fighting in front of her.

She’s not sure, at the end there, if it was one of her waves at all. It could’ve been Peter’s. That was something she never accounted for, an obvious mistake. It definitely makes MJ feel better to blame her friend. The theory sits with her for hours in the sun, baked into her skin beneath the slathering of sunscreen. If she attributes the cause of their rift to his hormones, her actions since his body pressed her snugly into the couch don’t seem so juvenile. Why did she ever worry about leaving their early years behind? Clearly, she’s still capable of acting like a child.

Some days, when one of the other teenage lifeguards steps out of the change room with their flipflops slapping and their uniform t-shirt not yet soaked in sweat and chlorine, MJ gives up the designated chair and lies down on the closest cracked-plastic lounger. They tell her she can head home, sounding confused that they even have to assert as much; who hangs around at their job on a perfect summer day? Who stretches out on their stomach so they can’t see the flat cornflower expanse of the sky? She tells them she knows and shuts her eyes, listening to the water lap up and over the walls of the pool.

During one of her final shifts at the end of August, before the pool opens to the public for the day, she finds herself kissing another lifeguard—tall, tan, charmingly gap-toothed—in the supply room while they’re dragging out the sun-bleached beach umbrellas. It’s fun at the time, but ultimately unsatisfying. The guy’s height isn’t the only reason it doesn’t feel right. MJ’s honesty doesn’t get time to corner her denial and force her to admit _why_ it doesn’t feel right because, suddenly, school’s starting again and she’s back at Midtown.

Clubs resume in the second week and MJ hits the ground jogging. (Why run? It’s junior year and she needs to conserve her energy.) She tries to treat Peter like everybody else, without exactly having a prepared standard for how to treat everybody else. The point is not to behave any different towards him. Ignoring the fact that this past summer was the first time they didn’t hang out at least twice a week, and that it’s because she was scared of anything feeling like a date, MJ simply attempts to smother this instinct she seems to have to make Peter Parker the most important person in the room. Watching him for signs of superhumanity, mocking him for being unable to tear his eyes away from Liz, selecting him as a make-out buddy when she could’ve picked Ned to practice with and left Peter to solve his own performance issues—she focuses on him too often.

The decathlon team has a busy schedule of local meets right before Thanksgiving. The competition’s tougher this year, or it’s that MJ’s still working on filling Liz’s shoes, and she’s afraid that her team will feel the pressure and let it wear them down. She tries not to show her surprise when they endure. They win the semi-final and she happens to be smiling when her eyes meet Peter’s over Ned and Betty sustaining a rather lengthy hug between them. The completely normal, contented tug of MJ’s mouth hurts—god, does it hurt—as she allows herself to look back at him.

What hurts more is walking back to the prep room they’ve been given later on and flicking the lights on to find Peter with both hands deep in the blonde hair of the captain of the team they’ll be facing in the final the next day. Kissing her. MJ staggers back, snapping the lights off on the way out, conscious of Peter whipping his head around.

She has seconds.

Concentrating on the tidiness of the fire extinguisher mounted in its neat glass case on the opposite wall, she breathes in through her nose, out through her mouth, and straightens her yellow blazer. Peter bursts from the room and the girl darts out fluidly, taking off in the other direction. All of her friend’s motion dies when he stands in front of her. Oh, he was coming to get her. MJ projects less than none of what she’s feeling onto her face.

“So,” he says, hand rising with the clear intention of rumpling his hair, “I guess you saw—”

Either the look she gives him or the way she grabs his wrist to halt him from disheveling himself is enough to stop Peter in his tracks a second time.

“Of course you did,” he says. “It was just, I mean, it was the adrenaline of winning today! The intensity of the rivalry and, and I just—”

“I don’t care,” MJ tells him coolly.

“Well, yeah, but I thought I should—”

“I’m your captain, Parker, not your girlfriend. Just try not to spill any of our team’s trade secrets to her before the final.” She gives him a friendly smirk and he smiles perplexedly in response.

Winded and vacant, she manages to get lost on the way back to the vending machines where she left the rest of her team, but Betty intercepts her. Able to tell that something isn’t right, though not as probingly observant as MJ (and accustomed to MJ not being the type of person to invite questions), Betty goes ahead and assumes that her captain has her period and has a tampon out of her backpack and in MJ’s hand before she can blink. She appreciates how Betty steers her to the bathroom door and leaves her alone. Shut in a stall, MJ closes her eyes and weighs hygiene against relief before resting her forehead on the cold metal of the door. She slips the tampon back into Betty’s backpack while they’re out at dinner and everyone’s focused on helping Mr. Harrington remember where he might’ve left the credit card Midtown’s principal entrusted to him for team-related expenses.

In the morning, MJ looks lazily from the name tag that identifies their opponent’s captain as _Gwen!_ right into the blonde girl’s eyes as she gives the final correct answer, winning Midtown the tournament.

Trying not to hear anything, no rumour of a second meeting of mouths between Peter and Gwen reaches MJ in the following weeks. Internally criticizing herself the whole time, she then _tries_ to hear, and still gets nothing. Apparently, Peter really did just give in to his adrenaline in the moment. She decides it’s a relief. All that kissing they did last year was always going to be for someone’s benefit. Maybe this is course-correcting something that went astray when Liz moved to Oregon.

If first base was for Gwen, then second base is for… well, Peter and MJ don’t entirely have that figured out as they French in the back of the fancy car Tony Stark allotted to his intern (yeah, there’s something very fishy there, she realizes, but it’s for considering another time) on the night of Midtown’s junior prom. It’s been months since November—months of MJ getting into the mindset that Peter’s _supposed_ to kiss other people, months of Peter growing so horny for intimate contact that he couldn’t turn her down when she suggested doing this again. The warm air of a thick summer evening seeps through the moon roof, giving mass to the beam of lunar light that hallows them.

“C-can I?” Peter asks.

When she rolls her eyes and takes his hand to guide it, the crystal glow above gets in her eye like a physical obstruction, so MJ’s eyelashes are fluttering involuntarily at the moment that her friend’s palm lands on her boob over her prom dress. It’s strange, feeling someone else’s touch. She’s going to remark on it, but then her eyelashes relax their fluttering and she gets a good look at the expression on Peter’s face. She can’t joke or belittle this moment when he’s staring at her, looking so _grateful_.

With her own hand, she moves his. It stops him from petting her like a cat and gets him to caress her like—her inner voice chokes on the word—a lover.

“For the next girl,” MJ reminds him as his focus slides from one of her eyes to the other, looking stunned that she’s guiding him.

“Whoever she is.”

“We’re being proactive.”

“Yeah,” Peter agrees, continuing to knead her breast gently as he angles his head to catch her lips with his.

She smiles into it, pleased that they’re on the same page. She already decided they would be tonight; the emotional turmoil of dressing up and having people view her with their actual eyes is plenty to deal with. It’s good to find that this friendship’s steady. Super steady. MJ leans into both Peter’s touch and his kiss, bracing her hand on his thigh. When he stifles a moan against her mouth, she pretends, momentarily, that she _is_ the next girl, and scratches her nails lightly across the fabric of his dress pants in response.

Less than a month later, they’re in Europe and a little less carefree. The feeling up has been halted entirely and their lips never come into contact. There are three main deterrents that MJ catalogues: some idiot with a terrarium on his head called Quentin Beck who keeps screwing up their vacation; the need to study Peter rather than make out with him because, based on his frequent and extended absences, he’s almost certainly Spider-Man; and Brad. Despite the calamity of the first and the monumentality of the second, the third is the one that really gets under MJ’s skin.

Brad is hot. Brad is attentive. Brad is well-versed in 20th century dystopian novels. Now, she’s never made a list of the traits of an ideal partner (partly because the closest thing she has to a partner is Peter, and he’s just her friend), but much of what Brad Davis brings to the table would be on it. And MJ is far from clueless—she knows Brad wouldn’t mind being on _her_. The problem with Brad, the thing that lands him on her list of deterrents instead of high dateability, is how he’s subtly positioned himself. Since they boarded the plane, Brad’s fabricated this competition between himself and Peter.

She’s told him that Peter is her friend. That should be sufficient, the last line of the conversation, the end of the ego-soothing. The more Brad casts guarded glances at Peter, the more MJ is forced to _think_ about Peter, not as a friend, but as someone other guys feel threatened by, like he’s drawn some line of territoriality around her, which really pisses her off. Only she doesn’t know who to blame. The one thing she’s certain about is that she can’t kiss Peter while she feels this way. _So, thanks, Brad_ , she thinks, every time she looks into his irrelevantly attractive face.

The only gain in clarity is when her friend finally confesses. Not feelings or any of that kind of shit, but confesses to being Spider-Man. MJ tries not to gloat (but she did figure it out).

Naturally, that gain is demolished in London when Beck attacks Peter with drones and MJ attacks Peter with her mouth, kissing him fiercely after she spots him limping from the wreckage. She tells herself it’s the fear. She tells herself it’s not _that_ kind of love. She tells herself it’s the rumble of gutted cars collapsing onto their seared-bald rims that she hears, not the thunder of an inrushing wave. Fire, not water.

London changes things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because it's bothering me, I want to note that I do mean "hallows" and not "halos." *stares the English language right in the eyes*
> 
> Anyway, here's ~~"Wonderwall"~~ to the next girl.  
> 


	6. when we were lovers/I loved you with all my heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long chapter!

It’s the first time since they were kids that MJ wonders who’s closer to Peter—her or Ned. They’ve never been in a tug-of-war for his attention, but it _has_ always felt as though Peter’s at the center, with her and Ned ringing him, rather than the three of them existing in a friendship that’s a perfect circle. He’s the favourite friend, drawn close for his complexities and squinted at from a distance for his chronic naivety. MJ and Ned are at extremes of unapproachability and openness; Peter is the happiest medium, the most charmingly unmysterious mystery man she thinks she’ll ever know. Their final year at Midtown is whipping by and MJ is comfortable knowing that she loves him.

In love with him? No. Loves him. She loves that they can talk, that she can drop by his place on a Saturday morning and he can swing by hers after midnight on a school night, still in his Spider-Man getup. May will be greeting her and setting an extra place at the Parkers’ table for breakfast in the same moment. MJ’s taken to having a glass of water next to her bed so she can offer it to him when he inevitably slides her window open and whispers, “ _Oh good, right building_.” (Every time. It’s Peter’s little joke.)

Most of all, she loves that Ned’s in the loop about her and Peter’s arrangement. It means she can give Peter’s mouth a goodbye peck after a study session if she knows he’s about to go on patrol and have it mean _take care_. That Peter can give the seat of her pants a quick, light swat as the most playful way to let her know she’s blocking his path to the kitchen or his view of the TV. Ned doesn’t know his friends have groped beneath each other’s shirts (Peter’s hands in the cups of MJ’s bra, hers digging into the ridges of his ripped abdomen) or that she’s sat on Peter’s lap while he panted out instructions and she rubbed him through his jeans, but Ned doesn’t _need_ to know everything. She’s sure there are conversations the boys have that she’s content to never be clued in on. It’s the same thing, pretty much.

Maybe her observational skills have grown slightly rusty without watching Peter’s every move to determine whether or not he’s Spider-Man, because MJ doesn’t see the conversation Ned initiates coming.

“Does he know you’re in love with him?”

She gives him a dirty, furious look and turns back to her screen. They’re in the computer lab, working on coding as a joint project with the robotics team. They’ll be graded on this and MJ needs to concentrate. There’s a flaw somewhere in her programming because, on the run-through, the robot refused to make its third left turn. She closes her eyes at the sound of Ned wheeling his chair closer.

“Do _you_ know you’re in love with him?”

“Of course not. I mean, of course I’m not,” she mutters impatiently. “We’re just friends. Like you and I are friends.”

“Uh, no,” Ned laughs and MJ darts a glare at him to suggest he not draw attention from the rest of their classmates. “You and I are definitely not the same kind of friends you and Peter are. You guys kiss.”

“You want me to kiss you?” she asks casually. She doesn’t look over, hoping to startle him out of this talk they’re having.

“I think I’ll stick to kissing Betty, my girlfriend.”

“Don’t say I didn’t offer.”

“You kiss,” he repeats, “you flirt—”

“We do not.”

“—and you text each other _about_ the kissing and flirting after midnight. That’s three lines you shouldn’t have crossed. It’s like _Gremlins_ , MJ.”

Now, she swivels to stare at him, hand clenched around her mouse.

“How do you know that?”

“It’s a classic.”

“About our texts.”

Ned’s mouth hangs open for a few seconds while he formulates a response.

“I… I… may have been helping out with a Night Monkey-related—” MJ rolls her eyes. “—tech update and accidentally ended up in your messages. Really though, it was an accident.”

MJ spares her friend a wary look before returning her gaze to the computer screen.

“They’re just texts.”

“No, they’re not.”

“They’re not sexts either, Ned. Nothing inappropriate.”

“Depends on your opinion of what’s appropriate in a relationship that’s _just friends_ ,” he replies, surprisingly snarky. MJ frowns. He wheels nearer. “Those texts are sweet.”

She jerks away like he poked her in the ear.

“So, what, I’m supposed to be mean to him?”

Ned sighs as though she’s trying his patience, which tries _her_ patience.

“I’m trying to look out for you guys.”

“By reading our private correspondence.”

“Ugh! You like him, he likes you!”

“He’s a boy. He likes a warm body and a wet mouth. I’m talking about kissing,” she clarifies at the stunned expression on her friend’s face.

“He’s _Peter_ ,” Ned argues at a hiss, “and he might go out there and fight crime and sustain mild injuries daily and moderate ones at least once a week, but he’s as soft as a marshmallow! Metaphorically!”

“He’s not always soft,” MJ counters with a knowing twitch of her head, voice nice and slow and clear. “Literally.”

She doesn’t know if he goes to Peter to have the same chat, but at least Ned doesn’t bring it up with her again.

She gets the stupid robot to turn left.

What she feels, as they progress through junior and then senior year, is a kinship with that robot. The material of their classes gets tougher, but not that much tougher, and MJ seems to be proceeding as though programmed. It’s easy, she knows what to do, the path has been laid out for her. Left turn, right turn, up the ramp, writing essays and filling in multiple-choice bubbles and standing with Ned and Peter’s arms around her as the three of them pose for pictures after crossing the stage at graduation.

Whether it’s a friends thing or a Friends of Spider-Man thing when they decide to all remain in the city for post-secondary, MJ can’t discern. It’s just nice to be close. To _stay_ close, while the freedom to choose that is the most powerful thing they have. She and Ned make the daily trek to campus from Queens, falling asleep on each other’s shoulders on the subway as they rattle towards early classes, but Peter, that dorky genius, gets student housing included in his scholarship because the school was that eager to attract him to their Chemistry department, practically on their knees.

MJ has a clear memory of using those exact words—‘on their knees’—and accompanying them with an eyeroll when Peter told her about the school wooing him. Even with that web-fluid-synthesizing brain of his, who would ever get on their knees for Peter?

Well. She hopes he doesn’t remember her words as clearly as she does as she looks up at him, bare knees pressed to the rough grey carpet of his dorm room. He hasn’t even unpacked everything yet, but MJ’s trying not to focus on the clothes spilling out of his open suitcase, keeping her gaze on her friend’s flushed face.

“Uh, maybe you should go first,” he suggests, offering a hand. She sighs and lets him pull her to her feet.

She doesn’t really want to go first either, but she can’t betray her nervousness.

“Why?” MJ asks bluntly.

“’Cause… because…” He’s flustered, crossing and uncrossing his arms with his half-hard dick pressing against the front of his jeans. She didn’t even touch him. “’Cause I need to know how to _do_ stuff,” Peter finally blurts, “not just how not to—”

“Immediately shoot your load?”

“ _MJ_ ,” he says in an exasperated tone. “Do you have to—”

“Yes.”

Being crass and brutally straightforward is going to get her through this. It has to. She has no backup plan for how else to deal with agreeing to try oral with her best friend for the first time.

“So, can we focus on me learning?” he pleads.

“No offense, but I don’t think you exactly have a handle on not-immediately-shooting-your-load.” MJ gives the excited swell of his groin a pointed glance. Exhibit A.

“Well,” Peter hedges, “I don’t even know if she’ll want to—”

“Suck you off?”

He groans.

“Sure, yeah, that.”

“But you said this girl seemed experienced.”

“That doesn’t mean I should assume. I’d rather be prepared to, you know, _give_ than to receive.”

“Generous of you,” she allows, then darts her hand out and gives his bulge a quick squeeze that almost takes him to his knees. “You probably should work on that eventually though.”

With a smirk, MJ sits down on his single bed and uses her hands to scoot backwards, widening her lips into a smile when he turns to look at her.

“It’s a lot to take in,” Peter says.

“How do you know? I didn’t even get to try.”

“MJ! The _visual_. It’s, it’s a lot, seeing you kneeling in front of me and knowing you’re about to… I mean, _someone_. _Someone_ kneeling. A person. Anybody.” He clears his throat. “Felicia.”

“Have you pictured _her_ doing it?” she wonders.

Although Peter’s still standing beside the bed, MJ’s starting to comprehend that, if they’re not practicing on him, they’re about to be practicing on _her_. That’ll involve her friend seeing her naked, having his face and mouth pressed against a place that’s neither her own face or neck, which is where he’s mainly kissed her in the past. A couple of times, he’s gotten carried away and descended to her collarbones, trailed out to her shoulders, but definitely nothing like having his head between her legs.

“Actually, no.”

“You _haven’t_?” MJ’s surprised. She’s never seen Felicia with her own eyes (she could search for her online, but she hasn’t), but from the way Peter described her after they met at a party during Orientation Week… well, not to objectify this stranger, but she sounds like every guy’s fantasy.

“It was kind of a crazy experience!” he emphasizes defensively. “Like, it felt like I’d barely spotted her when she was suddenly flirting with me—like seriously, _seriously_ flirting, M, raunchy as hell—and pulling my phone out of my pocket to put her number in. I couldn’t even think straight by the time she was walking away. The only way I know it was real is because all these people were looking at me with, like, pure jealousy. I don’t know why she picked me,” he breathes.

MJ rolls her eyes. She’s not sure which thing Peter’s forgotten in order to be so lacking in self-esteem—that he’s Spider-Man or that he has a body that would cause car accidents if he ever walked down the street with his shirt off.

“Even her face is kind of a blur.” At least he sounds embarrassed at that confession. She studies her friend.

“But, let me guess, other parts of her anatomy are more sharply engrained?”

“She didn’t have legs like yours,” Peter notes offhandedly. MJ’s mouth opens, she’s momentarily speechless, but he doesn’t go anywhere with that surprising remark.

“So, you never imagined her blowing you,” she recaps, grappling to regain control of this conversation, this practice session.

“No, I only ever pictured y—” He shuts himself up, gaze on hers in a flash. “Uh…”

“Ok, alright, so we get you ready to _give_ head. That’s the plan.”

MJ cuts off her own rambling by reaching down and fumbling at the five-button closure of her boyfriend jeans, doing her best to let her hair swing protectively in front of her face. Suddenly, Peter’s fingertips are on her wrist. She stops.

“Would it be alright if I practiced this too?”

Slowly, she looks up to meet his eye. He’s probably still hard, but there’s nothing in his face that says he’s in a rush, nothing demanding. MJ nods and Peter gets on the bed with her. On his knees. As he twists each button free, she’s able to watch him like she hasn’t in a long time. He got his hair cut a couple weeks ago, before school started, and it’s beginning to look like normal again after being shaped a little too short. She resists touching it. Then, she realizes she doesn’t really know where to put her hands, so her heartbeat’s thudding along even faster than it was when Peter’s fingers grabbed the waist of her jeans.

“Ok?” he asks and it feels like her head just makes a circle before resolving the motion into a definite nod.

She leans back farther on her hands as Peter parts the unfastened opening of her jeans with one hand and slides the other up the back of her shirt. His warm palm bracing the middle of her back feels nice and, though she’s still apprehensive about the naked thing, MJ hears herself hum in his hold. Peter’s brown eyes flit to hers. His hand slips higher as he surges over her for a kiss that starts out reassuring and grows needy. Her eyes are still closed, their mouths still brushing when the rasp of his zipper cuts across the damp sound of their breathing.

“What are you doing?”

“I thought…” Peter swallows and their foreheads touch. “…maybe it would feel more natural or something if I took my jeans off too. Not to do anything. Just in, like, solidarity?”

“Yeah.” MJ nods. “Ok.”

It’s a rare occurrence of her friend having a good idea in his regular life, not an instance of quick thinking as Spider-Man. He’s anticipated something and he’s _right_ , she does think it’ll be different, better, if she’s not half-naked while he’s fully clothed. More natural, like he said. People in a relationship would be undressing _together_.

She doesn’t help Peter as he backs off of her and strips himself of his jeans (and socks, she observes with a faint smile). He returns shyer, gently cupping her knees while she shifts and tugs to get her own pants off. Their next kiss feels like a transition; the second they separate, MJ leans back. Somehow, they’ve arranged themselves wrong and her head’s at the foot of the bed, but Peter has a chunky blanket folded here, so she rests her head on that. His hands skim to the inside of her knees, still pressed together, and wedge there when she flinches without parting them.

“It tickles,” she explains, and he smiles down at her, clamping his lips between his teeth. “Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m not.”

With obvious effort, Peter untenses his mouth to leave his expression neutral. Right as she’s easing her knees wider, he speaks again.

“You don’t have to do this for me.”

“I’m kind of thinking it’s at least a little for me too,” MJ points out.

“Right,” he says, sounding nervous. “Right.”

She places her hand over the back of his on her knee and strokes quickly.

“I want to. I want you to.”

“Then I will,” Peter tells her, and she makes room so he can lie down between her knees. Good thing he’s short; there’s not much of him left hanging off the end of the bed. With her head propped up by the blanket, she watches him rub the outside of her thighs for his own personal preparation…

…Before he leans straight in and presses his nose and mouth to the crotch of her peach underwear.

She gasps and jolts. Peter snaps his head up to look at her.

“What did I do? What’s wrong?”

“No, no,” MJ says, touching a hand to her heart over her t-shirt. “I just wasn’t expecting you to just… Nothing’s wrong. Uh, continue.”

“You sure?”

“Please.” She’s relieved he doesn’t say anything about how broken the word comes out. Or that she said ‘please’ instead of just ‘yep.’ A nod, even. A nod would’ve been fine.

His gaze is locked on her face when he lowers his head again. This is so much harder to deal with—the focus in his eyes, the controlled pace of his descent. A hot huff of air leaves his mouth; MJ can feel it through the cotton. Her pulse races in the taut length of her throat and she’s struggling to relax the rigidity of her body. _It’s ok_ , she reminds herself. She shouldn’t be self-conscious about simultaneously burning with curiosity to know what it’ll be like and wanting to balk at how vulnerable she feels. (Like Whitman, she is large, she contains multitudes.) Every step felt this way before they took it. Really, letting him poke his nose against her underwear isn’t any more earthshattering now than kissing him at homecoming was three years ago.

It’s _Peter_. She’s with Peter.

He digs his nose in harder and it bumps her clit as another of his hot breaths seeps through to her skin. MJ does her best not to wriggle. The steady pressure of his hands gliding down her legs to grab her hips helps with that. When she hears Peter inhale through his nose, she doesn’t know whether he’s smelling her or just gathering himself for the kissing that comes right after. She can feel them, the distinct nudges of his mouth over her underwear. It’s lucky that his gaze has dropped because staring at the gentle sway of his head between her thighs is sufficiently overwhelming. She folds her hands over her ribs and they’re lifted by the abrupt hitch in her breathing—Peter’s flattened his tongue to her underwear and the shift of the material his action causes makes her aware of how much wetness has soaked into the cotton. Not from his mouth.

“Can I take these off now?” asks Peter’s voice, but gravellier, his lips barely pulling back to make the request. “Actually, you know what, you better do it.”

“Why?”

But MJ’s already moving shaky hands to the elastic band at her hips as his clasp her waist, getting out of the way. He looks up her body at her.

“Because I might rip them.”

She doesn’t think she actually gets the “oh” out, but she’s pretty damn certain her face expresses it as her cheeks ripen with heat. Leaving Peter to determine his own evasive maneuvers, she removes her underwear with the frantic kicks of a child learning to swim. Her friend bounces back into place on his elbows, mouth in a huge grin.

“You’re enjoying this too much,” MJ accuses. It’s supposed to be mocking, or sarcastic, or something, but her voice is too breathy.

“Yeah, definitely.”

The noise she makes doesn’t communicate any particular emotion, at least not to her ears.

“What?” Peter asks, continuing to smile. “You think I’m gonna lie to you? I could never do that.”

The sentiment gets to her so much that she’s contemplating reaching out to touch her friend’s cheek in what would be one of the tenderest gestures she’s ever made towards him, but he starts licking at her with vigor and, mostly, she has to try not to scream. When MJ shoves her fingers into his hair (she hopes he never goes back to that barber because she has a feeling she’d enjoy a little more length to run her fingers through), she battles between wrenching him off of her and holding him in place. She makes her decision when his licks get gentler and concentrate on her clit at the encouraging, wordless shout that bursts from her lips. Oh right, she should be guiding him.

“Um, yeah, stay there,” MJ says belatedly.

“Here?” The word’s muffled because Peter doesn’t fully take his mouth off of her when he speaks.

“Mhmm.”

He _mmm_ s back in agreement and she briefly gets a cramp in the arch of her foot from how hard she points it, reacting to the sound vibrating against her.

“Sorry,” Peter chuckles.

“Stop screwing around.”

It snaps from her lips and she regrets it, fearful that he’ll be offended and insecure, which is how she’d probably feel if he said it to her, if tonight had gone the way they planned and it was _her_ wrapping her mouth around _him_. But she feels Peter’s grip flex minutely as he continues to hold her in position. And his mouth slows.

MJ sucks in a deep breath and peers down at him. He’s watching her, tonguing at her with not exactly _skill_ but an intense determination to do well.

“That’s… not bad.”

How he manages, she doesn’t know, but she’d swear the bastard finds time to smirk while switching from licking to sucking her clit.

“Better or worse?” he pauses to ask, right when she’s remembering that she needs to breathe.

So MJ does a very Peter Parker thing and gives him a limp thumbs up with the hand not tangled desperately in his too-short hair. What she’s given him isn’t actually an answer, but her genius of a best friend is smart enough to keep going. A minute later, she feels the tip of his finger skating across her slick entrance. Though she wouldn’t have believed herself capable when she was struggling to unbutton her jeans, she spreads her legs wider on instinct and pants as the sensation of Peter’s finger inside her piles up against the sensation of his tongue tracing hard circles around and under her clit.

 _It’s not real_ , she tells herself with her eyes closed and the _shush_ of distant waves in her head. _It’s just your brain trying to attach an emotional connection to the physical_. MJ knows she’s right, but her brain’s screaming back in a gull’s screech that it only feels this good because Peter is the _one_. That the warmth radiating from her body is love’s kindling and that it would be a great idea to encircle his finger with a ring the minute she’s done encircling it with her vagina. _Love, love, love_ , the squiggly, mate-seeking realm of her brain insists as Peter carefully hooks his finger in and out of her.

“Keep it in,” she breathes. “Keep it in and just, like, rock it like… _yeah_.”

Her praise comes wrapped in a heavy sigh. Too soon, her body adapts to the new pleasure and wants more.

“And then kind of, I don’t know.” MJ stares at the white ceiling, gaze scrambling as she strives against the fuzz of approaching bliss to describe the best way for him to get her there. “Scoop?”

“Scoop?” he repeats, and tries out his interpretation.

“ _Ah_! Yes, yes, that, do that! And lick me again. _Fuck_ …”

She comes with Peter’s tongue squashed down on her clit and his finger doing all the right things inside her. Her moan isn’t loud, but it refuses to quit for a while, hanging in the air of his dorm room. It feels like she’s sweat through the back of her t-shirt. She’ll steal one of his when she gets up. Releasing Peter’s poor hair, MJ scratches her nails across his scalp to help with any pins and needles. He grunts.

“Feels good?” she asks lazily, rolling her head to the side on the blanket to glance down at him.

He rises up on his hands, red-faced and glossy-chinned. Her hand falls. Knowing Peter, she’s anticipating an expression of triumph, but he looks bashful.

“Uh…”

“What? Did you hate it?” The second question is said in a small voice that can’t be hers.

“No way. It’s not that. I, um…” Peter rubs a hand down the back of his neck. “Did you hear the sound I made?”

MJ nods, at ease again, pleasantly hazy and wanting his heat back, his body draped along hers, her face tucked into his chest. That same meddling section of her brain is selling her on the idea of a little casual cuddling.

With a resigned sigh, he sits up on his knees.

“Oh,” she says to the evidence that she’s not the only one who just got off.

“It’s not my fault.” Peter points at a pillow that she’s _sure_ wasn’t in that exact spot before, though it was always at his end of the bed. It’s indented where it lately cradled his hips. He’s gonna have to wash that pillowcase.

“You’re blaming a pillow.”

“And you.”

“Me? I touched your _hair_.”

“Well,” he mutters, “and you made all those noises and—” He wipes a hand over the bottom half of his face. “—did this.”

MJ’s a little stunned.

“It turned you on that much?”

Bizarrely, that’s what makes her self-conscious of her lower half still on display. She draws her knees up and lets them fall to the side. Peter touches her ankle absently.

“I wasn’t expecting it either.”

“No. I thought you’d probably jerk off the second I left,” MJ teases, “but using a pillow _while_ you, uh, practiced on me. Jeeze, Parker.”

There’s an unassuming smile on his face as his hand shifts to clasp around her ankle, his thumb caressing the bone affectionately. Water. Water pouring down an incline towards her.

“I felt so close to you,” he mumbles, looking at his fingers splayed up her calf.

The water stacks and freezes only to splinter off, a glacial ice chip that shoots like a spear, right through her. MJ scrabbles to a seated position. He’s muddied her uncomplicated pleasure.

“You should call her,” she blurts. “It’s only nine. You guys could hook up tonight.”

Peter squints at her like they’re not speaking the same language. He’s never looked at her like that before. It hurts. Pushing him away hurts, and she only pushes harder when she feels the pain.

“I think I’m, um, I’m going to use the girls’ shower,” MJ asserts, looking at the carpet and tucking her legs in tighter where she sits. “It’s one floor down, right? And you can get ready in here or whatever and I’ll, I’ll see you around. Later.”

“MJ,” her friend says softly. “We just… ok.”

She feels some kind of loop close up when she doesn’t meet his eye or jump in where he left her space. Peter rises and his feet cross her vision as he goes to his bedside table. He tosses something onto the sheet.

“Take my key card. If you’re tired or whatever, you can crash here. Since I guess _I_ won’t be home.”

Then he paces between his closet and his suitcase, acting like she’s already left the room, presumably searching for an appropriate hookup outfit. MJ wonders if Felicia would like Peter in cream. She does. He has this nice Henley shirt that— But no, he isn’t looking for suggestions. Blushing from her orgasm and regret and self-inflicted damage, she dresses and leaves the room with Peter’s key, a towel, and his spartan shower kit. The door clicks quietly behind her.

All she needed was the soap, but, under the hot water, she squeezes a glob of his bodywash onto her palm and starts massaging it into her skin until she realizes what a terrible idea it is. Except it’s too late. She smells like him.

He’s gone when she slinks shamefully back to his room after lingering in the shower. Felicia must have been available. At this point, MJ should go home. She really means to. She still means to when she trades her sweat- and sex-scented t-shirt for a heavily-creased one from Peter’s suitcase, swaps her jeans for a pair of his sweatpants, letting them hang low on her hips so they’re long enough to cover her ankles where he touched. She means to as she strips the sheets from his bed, the case from his abused pillow, and stuffs them into his laundry hamper. She thinks she’ll probably still get up when she sits down again on the exposed mattress, one hand pressing into the naked pillow.

But when she lies down with her wet head on that pillow and pulls the blanket over her because she couldn’t find a clean set of sheets, MJ knows what she’s doing. She’s letting the wave tow her in and out, in and out, until there’s water all around her and she can’t see the shore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...And the next chapter's even longer! Twice as long! Fear not, we're heading towards a happy ending.  
> 


	7. because I’m still in love with you/I want to see you dance again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every person who reaches chapter 7 receives [this complementary soundtrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suWbFPaVoEA) and the following fun fact:
> 
> The "wave-" portion of the title obviously refers to the internal imagery MJ uses to describe her relationship with Peter, but the "-tide" part is not about water! Rather, it's the archaic suffix referring to a season, occasion, or particular period of time (e.g. Yuletide). So MJ's "-tide" is defined by the presence of her internal wave, and since that wave never actually goes away (though she gets pretty good at ignoring it), she's always in Wavetide.

MJ wakes up with her head on his dumb, warm thigh. It’s too solidly muscled to be comfortable and she stretches her neck with a frown. Is he supposed to be here? For the moment, she’s too sleep-addled to recall.

“Don’t make that face,” Peter says. “I didn’t put your head there; you came to me.”

“Yeah right,” she says automatically, voice thick. The room is flooded with the thin, buttery light of early fall mornings.

She’s aware that things are rocky between her and her best friend, but it’s not until she rolls away to find his pillow again that the events of the night before grip her heart mercilessly. He’s here though, sitting with his back against the wall, his legs stretched across the width of the bed. She wonders exactly how _long_ he’s been here.

“You left me your key card,” MJ remembers.

“Yeah. You didn’t lose it, did you? I had to tell the front desk I misplaced it so they’d let me back in this morning, but I was hoping to conveniently find it when I got up here.”

“It’s around.”

“Ok.”

He doesn’t seem bothered by her vagueness, but something’s definitely troubling him. MJ clutches his pillow, curled as though she’s never been more comfortable, when there’s so much anxiety rising in her. Should she leave? Wait for him to speak? Mention that she spent the night rolling in the current of their history? But who are they this morning?

“You went to Felicia’s?”

“Yeah.”

She forces the next words out.

“So, what happened?”

“She gave me a blowjob and I came in, like, thirty seconds.”

Peter laughs at himself and MJ starts laughing too.

“What did I tell you!” she gasps through her laughter.

“I know, I’m an idiot!”

The minutes expand as she wipes the tears of hilarity from her eyes and he bends over, clutching his ribs like the funniness of his inability to last is going to break a bone. A bone. Laughter peals from MJ anew. She rolls onto her stomach and meets the open, slightly supplicating look in Peter’s eyes.

“But you stayed over? God, I didn’t think you had the guts.”

“I don’t. I got the hell outta there and went to Ned’s.”

“You went all the way to Queens last night? Why didn’t you just come back here?”

He drops his gaze and she feels the surge of saying what she shouldn’t have. It’s too late to catch the words or change them into anything that _isn’t_ a segue into what happened between them the night before. Not Peter and Felicia, not Peter and Ned. _Them_. Peter and MJ. The only ‘them’ that she’s clung to throughout her life.

“Hey,” she says, making a last-ditch attempt at diversion, “do you have any fresh sheets? I took—”

“I didn’t want to go.”

“Oh, I’m sure it was terrible. That’s why you only lasted thirty seconds.”

MJ says it lightly, but Peter meets her gaze solemnly.

“You told me to go,” he says.

“I didn’t _make_ you go, Peter.”

He lets out a distressed scoff, drawing his legs in as he turns to her.

“No, but you made it clear that you wanted me to!”

“Didn’t you?” She feels cornered as she lies there on her stomach.

“When I thought you didn’t want me here, yeah, I did!”

MJ’s eyebrow twitches up as a _well there you have it_.

“I would’ve stayed! If you had just said anything to indicate that it was what you wanted!”

“So, you just do what I want?” she shoots back. She rears up onto her knees, fingers digging into her thighs.

“I try to, yeah!” Peter says as he spreads his hands. “Like, last night? _Before_.”

She rolls her eyes.

“That was for Felicia’s benefit.”

“Are we still saying that?” he asks, sounding exasperated.

MJ glares.

“What do you mean?”

“The bullshit, MJ. About how everything we do together is for other people. We’ve been saying that since we were _fifteen_.”

His tone is pleading and coming from behind her as she climbs off the bed, annoyed when the cuffs of her sweatpants slide up her shins and stay there. Right. They’re not hers, they’re his. MJ tugs them back down and spins to glare at Peter.

“What do you want to hear?”

“Something real,” he says.

She shakes her head, deciding to blow him off. This is too much. She didn’t think she’d have to confront him so soon. She’s not _ready_. Why the hell did he come back to his dorm so early? The gentlemanly thing to do would’ve been to stay later at Ned’s, or even perch himself on the roof of this residence building and lurk up there, watching for her to exit.

“Yeah, well, I’ve never been great at that,” MJ reminds him.

First shoving her feet into her shoes, she next collects her keys, her phone, her transit pass. She laid them out neatly after her shower last night, gathering her belongings from where the hasty removal of her jeans had scattered them across Peter’s floor. Speaking of, she scoops up her clothes.

“That’s not true.” He catches her elbow but allows her to shake him off.

“It _is_ ,” MJ insists. She can’t get her heel into her right shoe. Goddamn it. “I’ve never been able to tell you anything.”

Her foot thumps in.

“You could start,” Peter suggests softly. “Or I could. I know you and Ned still joke about how I can never shut up.”

“Only when there’s a girl involved.”

She unlocks his door and hauls it open. Her heart is a rabbit, kicking to get away. There’s no clarity cooped up in this room with him.

“That’s exactly why I guess I should’ve said something sooner. I just… I didn’t really put it together until last night.”

“I don’t want your mysteries anymore,” MJ tells him as she steps out.

How could he? How could he fling a sudden realization at her when she’s been pining for years? Coaching him to first base for Liz Allan and discovering him kissing Gwen. Letting him feel her up with no one in particular in mind, but always the sense of another presence, a future recipient. Watching him get ready to round third base with Felicia at, really, the subtlest push from her, only done because she panicked.

MJ isn’t lonely. She has dating apps jammed with messages to assure her that the same skills she’s practiced with her best friend could be put to use elsewhere. It’s just so hard to go for anyone else when there’s Peter. Why has he never tried to investigate her secret the way she investigated his? How is it that she knows he can heal a papercut in minutes, lift hundreds of pounds with ease, walk straight up a wall, and he doesn’t know she’s in love with him? Profoundly, apocalyptically in love with him.

New York’s as beautiful in the fall as every blockbuster rom-com and Central Park-plastered pamphlet want people to believe, and it makes heartsick MJ sublimely angry. The organic glamour of trees blazing in their warmest tones, the half-dozen varieties of farm-fresh apples in even the crappiest grocery store, blinding sunshine at noon and thunder after midnight—she doesn’t love any of it this year. She wants to dive directly up into the stupendously layered grey clouds at evening and swim to Saturn’s rings.

The pumpkins on stoops transform into jack-o’-lanterns; she hasn’t spoken to Peter in a month.

Every day, she wakes up drained and contemplates calling him. They’ve never _really_ been through anything they couldn’t fix. Punishing Peter for being an intuition-less dumbass is pointless. It’d be like trying to take the feeling of satisfaction out of crunching her shoe down on a crispy brown leaf—not possible. There’s loveliness in the withering flowers MJ observes on her walk to campus and she yearns to ask Peter to come over after class and watch _The Addams Family_ with her. She needs him to help her weather this change.

It’s as simple as getting out of bed on Halloween and realizing she has something she needs to tell him: that there’s water trickling through the ceiling of her family’s apartment and if she doesn’t get a handle on it, they’ll be horrified when they get home from their annual pilgrimage to Salem, Massachusetts to pay respect to the women murdered in the trials. (MJ would’ve gone too, but she had a midterm the day before.)

The fact that she and Peter haven’t been talking is unimportant when weighed against the difficulty of dragging furniture away from the leaks by herself.

“It’s not even raining,” he says, jacket stripped off and cartoonishly-large wrench hefted uncertainly in his hand.

“It was earlier this morning,” MJ says. He was probably asleep then while she was in bed in the fetal position, missing him. “I think the water must have been accumulating above the ceiling somewhere and it finally found a way through.”

She grumbles about the ridiculousness of her parents calling their top-floor apartment ‘the penthouse’ when its only exceptional quality is being closest to the rain as she shoos Peter up the stairs to the roof access. The culprit is, fortunately, easy to spot; the tar and gravel mix coating the surface has crumbled away from the large intake vent and there’s an exposed crack. No other area seems like it would let water in, so MJ pries the useless wrench from her friend’s hand, goes down to the apartment, and comes back with the waterproof silicone her dad used to reseal the edges of the shower. Her family’s water problems are manifold.

“Are you sure we should be doing this?” Peter asks as a chilly wind whips the edges of his open button-up and sets her shivering, hair damp from the indoor drizzle.

“The super can fix it better, but I really don’t want more water coming through if it starts raining again.”

“Ok. Are you sure _I_ should be doing this?”

MJ smiles at that, a small smile, and urges him on with a jerk of her chin. He crouches with a sigh.

“Pretend it’s web fluid.”

“Right, because that’s what I do all night—swing around and fill the cracks in people’s roofs.”

“You should. They’d appreciate it.”

She’s expounding on how Spider-Man could branch out into pothole repair to distract them both from the wind. His fingers have to be freezing as he works the caulk gun. It’s a one-person job, but she doesn’t think to go inside, even to grab a coat. She just stands sentinel until he jumps up, saying it’s done.

In the apartment, Peter moves furniture while MJ throws rags and old towels down where water’s pooled on tile and seeped into the carpet. There are three slow, persistent drips—she lines up a pitcher, a take-out coffee cup, and a plastic trash can on the floor beneath them. This place is going to stink by tomorrow. Maybe it’ll be warm enough this afternoon for her to open the windows and air things out.

They meet, suddenly and accidentally, in the hallway, both backing against a wall to end up opposite each other.

“Is it ironic that the only thing in here that’s dry is the bathtub?” he asks. She laughs, fingers twisting behind her back.

“Peter—”

“I don’t think anything’s in _too_ bad of a shape. Your parents’ dresser looked kinda antique, so I just webbed it to the wall so it wouldn’t be sitting in water.”

“Thank you.”

“You made a good point about using my web fluid for home repairs and stuff.”

“For coming over,” MJ clarifies. “Thank you for coming over.”

“Well, who else are you gonna call? Man, the construction industry in this city is a racket. The second somebody sees you’re already in trouble, all your shit inch-deep in water, they’re going to set some kind of crazy rate—”

“Not that you’re wrong, but what the hell are you talking about?”

Peter laughs in a burst of self-consciousness, pushing at his sleeves.

“Sorry, I was home with May last week and she was ranting about a plumber.”

“I called you because I feel comfortable counting on you,” she divulges while he looks relaxed and she feels brave.

She watches him swallow before replying, “Good.”

“I… I should’ve made that obvious before now.”

“I knew,” Peter says quietly. “Can I just…? I’ll be right back.”

MJ leans away from the wall to follow him with her eyes. He goes to the jacket he left over the back of one of the kitchen chairs and returns with one hand closed into a fist, which she stares down at. Instead of sagging back against the wall, Peter stands in the middle of the hallway, close to her. She’s suddenly warm all the way down to her soggy socks. He raises and opens his hand. There’s a dark glass flower in his palm. Black, actually.

“I got you this in Venice.”

“When were you in Venice?” she asks, knowing the answer. He must understand that because he ignores the question.

“I forgot I had it until the other day. Tore my room apart looking for it. My room at May’s, that’s why I went home.”

She’s not sure whether she wants to ask why he bought the necklace or why he never gave it to her, but she has a feeling those questions express opposite yet inseparable desires.

“I love it,” she says simply, tracing the imperfect dahlia. His fingers begin to close reflexively when the tips of hers skim his palm, so she lifts the necklace free and puts it on.

“It’s a couple years late.”

“It’s not.”

MJ stares Peter in the eye and his hand is suddenly on her shoulder, then pressed to the wall beside it.

“Then maybe something else isn’t either,” he says.

She grips the bend of his elbow. He steps in close, inches between them.

“Guess what?” Peter whispers.

“What?”

The soft look in his eyes skips across her face.

“I’ve never wished for anything like I wished to kiss you on my thirteenth birthday.”

They’ve kissed since that night. They’ve kissed so many times. Hopelessly, MJ smooths the front of his button-up. It’s wrinkled, like he shrugged it on in a hurry to get over here when she called. The t-shirt underneath only appears ironed because it hugs his body so tightly. She looks from the creased chest pocket to his mouth. Every kiss they ever shared was intended for other people. This one will be for them.

MJ tips her chin forward in invitation and Peter presses his mouth to hers. It isn’t desperate and rough, or arrogant with refined technique. She understands. This is the kiss he would’ve given her that night, under the sleeping bag, in front of an audience of fireflies. Feeling and wetness spring up under her softly closed eyelids and she grabs the back of his neck, holding their faces together until she’s completely out of air and has to allow their lips to slide apart.

“I should’ve let you kiss me when we were thirteen,” she breathes.

“It wouldn’t have been that good.” Peter’s teeth graze her lip when he smiles. “I’ve had a lot of practice since then.”

Keeping her hand on his neck, she runs her other hand up his arm, starting where he’s still braced against the wall. When MJ reaches his shoulder, she pulls, and he crowds his body into her space. Feeling his chest against hers makes her heart jitter. But she’s floating. These waters are familiar to her now.

“I’m in love with you again,” she confesses.

“I’m not totally sure what that means, but same.”

And he surges into her this time, their lips sealing, then slipping wetly as Peter angles his head with determination. He kisses her so deeply that she grows open-minded to the possibility of him bringing her to orgasm like this. MJ knows the power of mouth-to-mouth; she used to be a lifeguard.

She can feel him swelling in his jeans, his hips kept pushed against her. He doesn’t retreat or hide because they’ve always been open about this. Well, maybe not when they were fifteen and doing their damnedest to pretend Peter had anything at all down his pants other than the erection that making out with MJ gave him, but mostly. They’ve been _mostly_ open. It feels so different though—not the stiffness of her best friend’s arousal, but the way he’s untethered himself to be part of this kiss. Insisting that every physical intimacy they shared wasn’t real was their electric fence, always warning them away from getting too close, from crossing that line. Now, MJ has her wave wrapped around that wire and everything’s electrified. Kissing Peter for no reason besides wanting to is exhilarating.

“You want to—”

“Yes,” she interrupts.

“You don’t know what I was gonna—”

“ _Yes_.”

MJ bites his lip and works with impatient roughness at the button and fly of his jeans. Peter tilts his head back, grinning as he groans happily, both hands clapped to her ass.

“It’s like eight in the morning,” he points out.

“Rise and shine,” she counters, plunging a hand into his boxers to grip him and withdrawing on a smooth stroke.

He chokes out a broken sound and MJ laughs, taking her hand out and patting him on the hip. She goes to squeeze out from between him and the wall, thinking _bedroom_ , thinking _horizontal_ , but apparently, Peter left his patience behind with their previous non-romantic arrangement; his hand lands on her waist with conviction and he drags her back, the fingers of his other hand sinking into her hair as his tongue strokes into her mouth.

“Mmm,” she hums contentedly against his lips, and then, “Mmph! Peter!” when he wedges a thigh between hers and presses up.

He pulls his head back immediately.

“No?”

“Yes,” MJ assures him, rubbing herself against his thigh. She smiles lazily and he angles his head to suck at her neck until the skin tingles as she continues grinding. “I just thought we’d manage to make it out of the hallway. I obviously overestimated us.”

“If you think I can’t make love to you in this hallway, I’m gonna have to prove you wrong.”

She snorts a laugh and, biting her lip, traces his hairline at the back of his neck.

“Are you sure you aren’t setting yourself up to fail? I happen to know you have zero practice at this.”

“Then we better stop dicking around, right?”

The joke is begging to be made, but Peter pushes her hips back, making her moan as the friction intensifies and ends. Giddy and impulsive, she flaps his button-up open and peels it down his arms to his approving sideways grin. Arms free, he whisks her pants down her legs. It’s hilarious to her that he jumps back upon discovering she isn’t wearing underwear.

“It’s my Halloween costume,” she jokes, giving his chest a light shove. “I’m a commando.”

“That’s not—”

“Shhh.”

MJ pushes him again and now he’s the one with his back to a wall. Without a word, he slides down it, tangling his fingers in hers so she’ll bend her knees to follow him before climbing onto his lap.

“How are we doing?” she asks with wry humour, cupping him again through his boxers.

“Definitely _not_ indifferent to seeing you naked yet.”

She’s straddling him; he’s staring. It seems counterproductive to adjust her shirt where it’s ridden up above her hips.

“Were you expecting to be?”

“No.” Peter licks his lip and she curls an arm around the back of his neck, just to touch him more. “Not ever.”

One hand on her ass, he sneaks the other up the back of her shirt and holds her close, craning his neck up to kiss her. MJ gets annoyed with trying to pump him through his boxers, but she knows things might get fast and dirty if she takes them off of him to get a better grip. There’s a question that needs to be asked first.

“You didn’t happen to bring a condom as well as a necklace, did you?”

“No. I’m an idiot. Also, I thought you maybe hated me.” He’s out of breath from the force of their kissing and it makes her smirk.

“Just hated you with anybody else,” she admits with a genuinely soft smile. “And it’s ok, I have a box in my room. Don’t move.”

MJ darts down the hall and into her bedroom. Peter’s hauled everything—her bed, her nightstand, her bookcase—away from the wall they usually touch. Her gaze lifts to the damp patch in her ceiling and she lets out an aggrieved whimper at the damage before jerking the nightstand’s drawer forward and crunching the box of condoms trying to get it open, finally tearing one free of the strip.

“Didn’t move,” Peter announces proudly when she rushes back into the hallway.

And, yeah, she can see that he didn’t. She can see plenty. He’s leaning against the wall and, without the shirt over his t-shirt, his arms are mostly exposed. There’s a freefalling sensation in the pit of MJ’s stomach as she stares at the way his short sleeves strain around his biceps. Then her feet are stuttering forward and she’s practically flinging the condom into Peter’s face.

“Why do you happen to have these?” he asks.

He’s looking down, yanking his jeans and boxers to his knees to expose himself and get the condom on. Her eyes widen. For as little mystery as his desire for her now holds (and the number of times he’s gotten hard in her presence), she’s never actually seen his penis before. A hot flush radiates up her neck into her cheeks. The memory of him, rigid in her hand, is fresh, and visually connecting the feel of him to the sight of his erection tapping his abdomen as it pulses in response to the pump he gives himself prior to unrolling the condom… He’s her best friend. He’s Peter.

“I figured there’d be a time when I needed them,” she explains. Her knees straddle his legs and start to ache until he motions for her to shuffle forward and sit on his thighs.

“Was there anybody…?”

“I wasn’t _waiting_ for you,” MJ assures him with a roll of her eyes. “I just didn’t want anybody else like I wanted you.”

Appearing way, _way_ too bashful for a guy with his dick out who claimed he could _make love to her_ without them relocating someplace novel, like a _bed_ , Peter tucks his chin and looks up at her affectionately.

“I’m flattered.”

“Express your gratitude,” she encourages, taking his hand and bringing it to her naked hip.

His little smile crawls into something far less cutesy.

“I love doing this.”

MJ gulps and asks, “Do you?”

The emphasis is in the way he cups her without preamble, running a finger along the sopping center of her. Peter doesn’t tease—either because it’s not his style or because they haven’t done this enough for him to nail down a strict handjob routine—he just spreads her arousal over her clit. Then more. Then _more_. When he manipulates her under eager fingertips, the slickness of his touch is so good that she cries out and digs her hand into the back of his neck.

He doesn’t slow down as she moans and does her best to rock with the motion of his hand, and he certainly doesn’t cease.

“Oh,” she gasps, “are you trying to…? Before we…?”

“I lasted thirty seconds on that blowjob, remember?” Peter huffs a laugh before his mouth falls open in sympathetic bliss as her moans get rougher and her thighs start to quake. “Wanna make sure you get off.”

MJ presses her forehead to his and nods in fervent appreciation with her eyes shut. It could almost be unintentional—he’s gotten her so wet—when his fingers slip back to her entrance and piston inside her. She yelps, tossing her head back, and Peter curls into her with purpose, stumbling through curses: “Holy shit, MJ. Holy _fuck_.” Everything is holy. He learns her as quickly as he learned the physical sciences and she feels canonized in his care. The dry fingertips of his other hand falter across her clit and she’s wet enough from the sloppy, overblown action of him moving in and out of her that those new fingers grip then glide, pitching her into climax with her thighs squeezing the outside of Peter’s.

There’s a ringing in her head, or maybe outside, or it could be the fucking rainwater trickling through the plumbing on its way to start another ceiling leak, and the ringing seems to go with the vibration, until the former fades and MJ continues to shudder in Peter’s lap.

“So, that went pretty well,” he decides, removing his hands and beaming at her when she lets her head flop forward to look at him.

“Loser.”

He brushes a strand of hair off her face and kisses her jaw.

“Not to rush you, but, uh, how long do you think for…?” An explanatory glance at his crotch.

With the zing of orgasm still in her nerves and limbs, she’s a little surprised to realize how badly she wants him inside her. Right away. If his fingers feel like _that_ , then something hotter, thicker, longer, and more sensitive to her should be… worth trying out.

“You put that on correctly, right?” MJ checks, meaning the condom. He tossed the wrapper aside, but it’s barely contributing to the mess of the apartment with all the rain that got in.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t wanna, like, watch a YouTube video or anything to check?”

“MJ. I know how to put on a condom.”

“It’s just that we’ve never—”

“I didn’t practice _everything_ with you, ok?” Peter blurts. His neck and ears glow red.

She bites her lips together, but it’s no good. The smile presents itself to him.

“You practiced putting on condoms.”

“It’s a _skill_ , alright? I didn’t want to be in the middle of it with some g— _you_ , with _you_ , and not be able to figure out the condom.”

“I understand.”

“You’re laughing at me.”

MJ is grinning pretty persistently.

“I’m not. It’s adorable that you practiced. I mean, thoughtful. Considerate. Good call, Parker.”

“Quit it.”

“I’m not…” She inhales slowly and wraps a hand around his dick. “…laughing at you.”

He gusts out a breath and looks prepared to forgive her the laughing that may or may not have occurred.

“I was careful putting it on,” Peter says. “I swear.”

“I believe you.”

Lifting her hips, she moves close to him and runs the head of his erection through the path his fingers took a few minutes earlier. Oh. Uh huh. This is promising. She notices his fingers gripping the floor.

“Try not to pull the carpet up, would you?”

“Oh, sorry.”

He’s artlessly bewildered and MJ did that. She angles her hips and grinds against his length, lubricating the condom from the outside. Peter bucks.

“You can put your hands on me, you know,” she encourages softly as she poises his head against her entrance again. “Just no death grip.”

“Promise.”

Once he’s gripping her hips—holding, but not controlling—she keeps his cock steady in her hand and eases down. She’s not in a hurry and if Peter wants to get where the tension of his body, the heave of his chest, the glaze of his eyes, and the throb of his erection are all communicating that he wants to go, then he can go ahead and make her the second woman he’s come inside in thirty seconds. If he’s only a quarter of the way in when it happens, that’s fine. She won’t judge. He loves her, she loves him, and there will be so many chances to practice after this one.

Maybe he’s tapping into some kind of super stamina that Felicia didn’t get the benefit of because MJ’s taken him in fully and Peter hasn’t lost his shit yet. It’s a bizarre feeling, entirely alien to have this whole piece of her best friend held fast inside her, but she’s already adjusting. Like her body’s been waiting for him.

“‘Make love’ might’ve been strong words,” he pants with clear effort. “I didn’t know you were gonna feel like _this_. Try to… try to relax a little.” Peter runs his hands soothingly up and down her thighs. This idiot. Even struggling this hard, he’s trying to help _her_.

He’s right too. She needs to relax. Filling herself with him was a tight process and even though it feels fine at the moment, MJ can also tell she’s throttling him, possibly too clamped down to do this properly. Getting him off from sheer pressure instead of movement and only being able to break this connection when he’s spent and no longer erect doesn’t really seem ideal. Relax. Ok. She’ll relax.

“Christ!” he shouts.

Oops. She accidentally clenched instead of loosening off.

“Want me to do it again? Just kidding,” she assures Peter when he gives her a wild look that pleads for mercy without a word needed. “I’ll… just let me…”

MJ thinks, then closes her eyes. Relaxing makes more sense like this, it’s a goal she can see every side of, and she begins with her legs. She trusts Peter beneath her and gradually melts into his lap. Skipping the place where everything’s happening, she untenses her stomach, gingerly pushes her ass out to stretch her lower back. She’s worried when he exhales harshly, but then his hands start massaging the places she’s allowed to grow slack. It’s nice, warm, and, as one hand wiggles up inside the front of her shirt while the other makes undemanding circles around her clit, arousing. She feels herself get wetter and she’s smirking before she can open her eyes, predicting what they’re about to share.

Her first rises and falls are so tentative that Peter gives her a questioning look and MJ nods her permission for him to get involved. The hand up her shirt retreats to grip the underside of her thigh, aiding her in maintaining a cautious pace. She’s sure she’s doing something that would have to be described as even slower than inching up and down his dick, but when she studies Peter’s face, there’s no sign of complaint.

“I love you,” she sighs, admiring his tenderness, his self-control.

Peter opens his mouth and a strangled croak leaves it before his hips snap up to hers (a short distance to cover) as he comes. She wasn’t even moving; she paused to gather the wherewithal to speak. His head thuds back against the wall and he peers at her with dazed eyes from beneath lowered lids.

“New record,” he says.

“Mmm,” MJ agrees, leaning forward and kissing lightly across his cheeks. “That was at least a minute and a half.”

“I’m… not sorry?”

It might’ve taken glaring at him to get that response, but she’s glad it’s what he decided on.

“Good. I’m not sorry either. Nothing hurt and nothing went wrong and next time will be easier.”

How it feels as she climbs off of him is the physical equivalent of listening to static—not painful, but prickling; not like a lost signal, but definitely an altered frequency. She feels the same and different. Peter grips the base of his dick to prevent the condom from being removed until he does it himself a moment later. Then they’re just two idiots sitting in the hall with their pants off. MJ snickers. Her best friend watches her with eyes that are somehow sparkling.

“You had fun?” she asks, cupping her chin in her hand.

“A lot of fun. I’d actually be interested in having even more fun in five-to-ten minutes from now.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“I guess it’s like my accelerated healing?” he theorizes.

MJ gets to her feet and walks quickly to the bathroom as Peter lets out a light laugh behind her. If that’s the schedule, she needs to pee ASAP. With the foreplay beforehand and her dictating the speed of the thrusts during, she isn’t sore. She’s curious to see what their learning curve will be like, how much longer Peter might be able to go the second time, what he’ll feel like sliding more quickly inside of her. Even now, she’s clenching for him.

He’s gone from the hallway when she comes out of the bathroom, so she pokes her head into her bedroom, smiling when she sees him dropping their discarded clothing into her reading chair. Her gaze is firmly on his equally firm ass when he turns and sees her staring. She shrugs.

“I thought you’d wanna get out of the hall this time,” he explains.

“Yeah.”

She follows him into the bed she left unmade a couple hours ago and he left in the middle of her room right before they christened the hallway. Though the sheets are cool, Peter’s pleasantly warm as he tugs her close and wraps his arms around her.

“Hey,” he says, stroking his nose against hers. She smiles in spite of herself.

“Hi, Peter.”

Her heart pounds when he shifts like he’s going to mount her, but then he drops to the bed on the other side of her body and holds her back to his chest.

“Did you just do that because you wanted to be the big spoon and you didn’t want me to have to roll over?”

“Maybe.”

“Dork.”

She feels his nose behind her ear before he kisses her neck.

“We’re still half-dressed,” he notes against her skin.

“The half that was unnecessary to uncover.”

“I’ve decided it’s necessary.” He slides the hem of her shirt higher, palm skimming her stomach.

“Oh yeah?”

“If you’re ok with it.”

MJ grabs the hem and goes to show him _exactly_ how ok with it she is, but Peter’s hand quickly covers hers.

“Please, MJ? Let me do it? And then you can do me?”

Her sudden laugh rocks her and she takes her hands away.

“And then I can _do you_?”

“Take my shirt off,” he clarifies. “But, then, yeah… the other meaning too.”

“Deal.”

One thing Peter isn’t is a timewaster. He immediately pushes her shirt to her waist and leaves it there for a minute as he runs his hand reverently back down to her hips—up again, down again—sidetracked by the curve of her body. MJ doesn’t think he’s surprised when he finally shifts her shirt (and his hand) higher to expose her lack of a bra, but he still makes a kind of yelping noise in his throat that has her pressing her ass against his groin. He’s stiffening up. Alright, Spider-Man.

Electing to assist him just a little, she shuffles around, pulling her shirt over her head, mindful of not catching it on her new necklace. She’s just lobbing the shirt towards the foot of the bed when she feels Peter’s mouth on her back. He’s kissing her in earnest, like he’s been dying to touch his lips to her spine and the rounded poke of her shoulder blades. Indecisive, he goes from spreading his fingers wide to make contact with as much of the skin of her stomach as he can to contracting his hold into the thumb and two fingers he uses to pluck at her nipples. MJ arches against him, breathing heavier. He wriggles the arm he’s lying on through the bend of her waist and scoots down the bed so he can reach to start fingering her while his teeth nip the center of her back. As his fingers slip into her growing wetness, he exhales hotly over her ribcage. He presses down on her clit and she grabs his hand to keep him precisely _there_.

“This is nice,” she says. While her words are casual, her tone isn’t, not with this adamant pressure.

“Nice?”

“Nice. But I was told I’d get to take your shirt off.”

She’s restless to see him naked and to know what’s happening between his legs, since his lower body is no longer bowed around hers.

“Can’t I just—”

“No. I want to see you naked and I want to see it now.”

“ _There’s_ the bossy best friend who told me what to wear for every elementary school picture day.”

“You went for a lot of neon orange back then. Be thankful I ensured that May has photos she can display with pride.”

When MJ twists, Peter gets out of her way. She’s on her back now and makes room for him to kneel between her legs. The sheet’s all messed up, the discoloured corner of her ceiling looks like hell, and Peter’s eyes are roving her bared torso. Not a bad morning. Possibly her favourite morning. His expression suggests that offering him this view is like giving him the key to a room packed with puppies and his smile only disappears when his t-shirt blocks his face because she’s finally getting him completely naked. From his disheveled hair, to the hands that are transparently itching to get back on and in her, to the swollen cock jutting from his hips, MJ doesn’t think her view’s anything to complain about either.

“Now do what you must,” she says in a bored tone, shrieking when he throws himself on top of her—though he does catch his weight on his hands. “Dickhead.”

“Hmm?”

Like the smartass he is, Peter prods her abdomen with the relevant part of his anatomy, but he cuts the juvenile bullshit before she can roll her eyes; his fingers part her in a smooth caress. He gets her clit good and slippery and MJ’s writhing in tandem with his short strokes when he asks if she’d prefer him to keep going or grab a condom. She glances sharply towards her nightstand and the box protruding from the still-open drawer. Peter bounds to it and back over her with the haste and joie de vivre of a Golden Retriever. This time, she doesn’t bother questioning his condom skills, just takes over for him at her clit (he gives her the puppy-room look again when he gets an eyeful of her fingering herself) so he’s free to work himself back into her channel with restrained pushes and pulls.

“Is this too fast? Too much?” he wants to know, braced over her with a hand on the mattress by her head (a little bit on her hair, but it’s not pulling, so she doesn’t fuss for the moment) and the other holding her hip.

“I think I’d be ok with… you going a little faster.”

She lets her thighs fall farther apart. To allow him to thrust unimpeded, MJ relocates her hand to his hip. Then, with a frank smirk, to his ass.

“Can you blame me? I’ve been staring at that since our first gym class at Midtown. Peter, come on,” she implores as he lifts her hand off of him.

“I need…” he pants, then shakes his head and just shows her instead, pushing her arm down so her elbow bends and her upturned palm is next to her head. He slots his fingers between hers and she becomes his anchor as he starts to thrust more quickly.

More quickly is not yet _very_ quickly and MJ has time for all the little things she wants to do—on instinct, in response to him, and just because she finally feels authorized to touch him. There’s no more rationale required, no excuses like sitting in his lap because it’s where they agreed she should sit, or letting him unhook her bra because they picked a certain day to go to second base. Where their fingers are intertwined, she rubs her thumb over his knuckles. She lifts a foot and trails it up the solid muscle of his calf. Her available hand settles on his chest. Peter sways over her—returning and leaving and inevitably returning again, like the wash of water up a beach.

Between her thighs, their joining feels hot, urgent. She raises her leg to try propping it over his hip (because maybe it’ll be sexy or whatever, and MJ finds she wants to be sexy for him, so he can never see her as just a friend ever again), and it causes her to squeeze around his cock. Peter _groans_. Certain he’s about to climax again, she freezes, but he keeps thrusting steadily, not a single erratic motion. The sensation of him rocking in and out of her has felt like something on the good side of strange since they started, but now, because she changed the angle, it’s something totally different. MJ slides her hand up his chest and grips the back of his neck, pulling Peter down to her. He comes willingly. In fact, his entire body drops closer until he’s brushing across her _everywhere_. She takes in a quick, shocked breath as he drags over her clit and he uses the opportunity to fill her mouth with his tongue.

They’re kissing messily—MJ may even whimper—with no accommodating angling of their heads. There’s just their noses pressing into each other and Peter’s tongue behind her front teeth and her bottom lip getting sucked into his mouth. She comes with a jolt and he swears for her. Does it strain him, she wonders as she arches to rub her clit against him and extend the pleasure, to behave this well? To not do like men do in movies and flip her into a position that suits _him_ and finish this on his terms? To be the man and not the spider, and presumably _her_ man at that, and be humanly attentive instead of animalistically propelled to fuck? Peter frees her hand to grasp her by her raised thigh and pulse to a finish that, miraculously, arrives with him stammering, “M-Michelle,” against her lips.

She hasn’t scrambled to hug him like this since Tower Bridge. And she’s feeling all the same things—joy, relief, the rightness of folding her arms around his shoulders. The only thing missing now is the faint, troubling thought that she can only hold on so long; MJ’s pretty sure Peter will let her cling to him for a full 24 hours if she insists.

“Fuck, that felt good,” he mumbles, pushing his lips against her throat without exactly kissing her because he’s still catching his breath. “I love you so much. Can we do that every day?”

“We’ll see.”

“Can we do it in fifteen minutes?”

MJ laughs, vibrating beneath him, and smacks him between the shoulder blades.

“Or we could get breakfast.”

“That sounds good too.”

Sure, he’s agreeable, but the little shit still stretches back down her body as he withdraws and starts sucking on her nipple. Their eyes lock when the sensation makes her clutch the head of his dick, but after a tense moment, MJ wiggles her hips away. They can experiment with how much time it takes to fuck him back to prominence while he’s still inside her some other day.

She doesn’t know what he’s doing when they push out the front door of the building and he takes her hand. Her immediate thought is that Peter’s about to yank her back from some danger, but then she remembers all over again that this is something they can do now. MJ links their fingers and holds on securely, possibly stealing glances at their reflection in ground-floor windows. They shiver and shimmer in the glass as they stride along together. Maybe the rainclouds were swept out over the ocean, but the clear autumn sky won’t tell. In the little restaurant, at a wobbly table, she laughs with him over under-seasoned scrambled eggs and pancakes crowded with fat blueberries. All of it’s the best thing she’s ever eaten and she thinks her smile might finally shatter when Peter says, “So, what do you want to do for the rest of the day?” But it endures.

They eat again mid-morning, like they’re starving. MJ sits on the kitchen counter as she fries cubed potatoes in popping oil. They’re golden, crispy, and smelling richly and woodsily of rosemary, her one flourish. It makes Peter nervous until she swings her legs over the side and lets him stand between them, necking her as she flips their brunch with a fork, one piece at a time. He slots bread into the toaster and she hops down to hug him from behind while he hunts for jam in the fridge. They are the kings they once were as they stared into the Leedses’ black backyard.

May calls Peter in the afternoon; MJ hides her hot face when he tells his aunt he’s with his girlfriend. And her exasperated smile when he adds, “I know you called it. Quit gloating.”

He coaxes her back into bed in exchange for the promise that they can stay there all night instead of opening the door every five minutes to the child residents who’ll be trick-or-treating in the building tonight. For dinner, they split the Halloween candy MJ will no longer be distributing; Peter gets over his guilt of depriving her young neighbours of chocolate after chewing his way through a few Snickers bars. The bed is so strewn with crinkling wrappers that they abandon it after all to have sex on the couch. MJ covers both their mouths—halting the moaning that’s getting a little obscene in their third round of practice—when small fists thump the door of her family’s apartment. Peter starts thrusting again before the kids are gone and she can only hope they interpret the creak of couch springs as a spooky soundtrack left on in an empty apartment.

There was never a time when MJ wasn’t aware that her best friend was a horny bastard. She understood that, physically, he wanted her, and that he wanted her often. He might’ve been the one with the absurdly busy schedule of a student moonlighting as a superhero, but he was somehow always available when she suggested they meet to practice kissing and fondling. That freedom spoke to a certain level of enthusiasm. She just always figured he saw her as a stand-in, which was fine, since he was supposed to be the same thing for her. Like Frankenstein’s creation, she was a collection of body parts, assembled for function over personality or any desire for human intimacy. She was wrong. It’s clear that Peter wants her so much more openly—and so much more _often_ —now that they’ve abandoned the pretense. MJ is no one’s replacement, and, with the way he gazes tenderly down at her while pounding her into the cushions, she realizes that no one could replace her. They laze for a while afterwards and she runs her fingers through his hair. The length is perfect.

It’s true, what they say about wearing a partner’s clothes: she slips into Peter’s button-up (and _only_ the button-up) to clean off the bed and walk around it, fixing the sheets, and gains his full attention. The display also seems to cut his refractory time in half. Before she can fluff the duvet over the smooth sheets, he’s tackling her onto the bed, biting her ear and pleading for her to be on top again. He barters homework help (forgetting they’re in completely different disciplines) and household tidying responsibilities (forgetting he doesn’t live in this apartment). MJ accepts both, then, as he squirms to get under her, mentions this was how she wanted it anyway. Peter doesn’t appear even faintly regretful.

The last time she was on top, he was sitting up against the wall, their heads conspiratorially close, in it together. He looks like he’s wondering whether he should sit up again, but she touches his chest and pushes him back down. She straightens her spine. Peter’s eyes gleam and he grips her thighs. MJ’s ready now, to be so visible that he won’t look away. When her legs are burning and she’s close enough that her thoughts are shredding like the bittersweet end of a dream, she folds forward over his chest and feels none of her earlier power in riding him taken away. She entrusts her pleasure to the determined upward sling of his hips. Their chests heave, their hearts pump, and she breathes raggedly in time to her boyfriend’s secret sounds.

“That’s all,” she pants when they’re done. “Don’t wake me up for sex.”

Peter sighs.

“Don’t worry, I’m totally wiped. I’ll be too tired to even think about sex for, like, a week.”

MJ snorts.

“Bullshit.”

Although it’s not the first time he’s slept over, or shared her pillow, or borrowed a pair of her dad’s pajama bottoms and rolled up the cuffs, it is the first time they’ve needed to puzzle out where her shoulder should be if he wants to close his arms around her. They curl into each other. What they’ll do if they’re ever together when Peter has to rush out to be Spider-Man is something they don’t know yet, but he won’t leave her this time. He’s giving her today.

She’s cranky to be woken around two in the morning.

“Told you no,” she grumbles, swatting at the hand that just shook her awake.

“I’m not waking you up for sex,” Peter promises. “Come look at the moon with me.”

Only for this—and for the adoring look in his eyes, and for the warm kisses he scatters across her cheek—does she tumble out of bed.

Peter pushes the curtain aside to reveal a full, luminous moon.

“Wow,” MJ whispers, because _wow_.

“I know,” he says. “C’mere.”

When she moves close the way he wants, he encircles her, palms pressed to her lower back. She smiles with a combination of nostalgia and wryness and wraps her arms around his shoulders. On the street below, teenage trick-or-treaters laugh and holler as they run past her building. There’s a party raging downstairs, so the two of them slow dance to “Psycho Killer” and the _Ghostbusters_ theme song. There aren’t any steps, but Peter’s not the kind of friend who forgets. Not the kind of lover.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **HAPPY HALLOWEEN!**


End file.
